INCOMMON. Affective Environments and Politics in a Digital Archive of Italian "New Theatre" (1959-1979)

Abstract

This paper examines the theoretical framework and design of the digital archive developed within INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959–1979) (www.in-common.org), a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council and hosted at Iuav University of Venice under the direction of Annalisa Sacchi.

Performance studies’ engagement with the question of archivability – gaining prominence since the 1990s – has prompted a rethinking of the archive as a site of epistemological negotiation and power. This critical discourse challenges the notion of the archive as a neutral repository, instead interrogating its role in shaping cultural memory through processes of selection, categorization, and exclusion. The archive thus emerges not as a passive space of preservation, but as an active agent in the construction of cultural memory.

Building on these perspectives, the paper explores how INCOMMON responds to such challenges by proposing an atlas that not only preserves but seeks to perform: one that resists the hegemonic custodial authority traditionally associated with archival practice and instead embraces the political, relational, and affective dimensions of performance. Conceived not as a stable ground, but as a dynamic field of interaction between materials, memories, and users, the archive reimagines how theatre histories might be assembled, experienced, and transmitted.

Structured through multiple user interfaces – referred to as “views” – each offering distinct modes of access, navigation, and interaction, the digital atlas becomes an inhabitable space where documents move, activate relationships, and generate conversations, choreographies, and new possibilities for engaging with history and historiography. The archive is not a neutral container, but a performative and affective infrastructure that challenges linear historical narratives, decentralizes accounts of Italian theatre, and foregrounds the ephemeral, the relational, the spectral, and the collective.

By investigating how the INCOMMON archive reconfigures the relationship between research and creation, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, this paper aims to address broader questions about how we might rethink theatre histories through a digitally constructed space, without silencing what resists capture, and without denying the political charge embedded in acts of remembering.