Disiecta Membra is an archive of orphaned twentieth-century materials, born from collecting paper documents and objects found in the abandoned houses of depopulated villages across the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines.
Since 2017 I have been exploring the Apennine territories, marked by a long process of depopulation, emigration, and the gradual dissolution of local communities. In the most remote villages, the interiors of ruined houses still hold traces that time has not yet erased: photographs, postcards, letters, notebooks, newspaper clippings, magazines, small objects that have passed through the decades unclaimed by anyone — remnants of an archaeology of the recent past spanning the entire twentieth century.
After years of collecting, the archive now comprises over a thousand vernacular photographs, hundreds of letters, postcards, clippings, newspaper pages, sacred images, and small found objects, often marked by the passage of time: creases, stains, mould, abrasions.
These surviving documents tell, from the perspective of the marginal Apennine territories, the history of the twentieth century. Not a linear narrative, but one made of gaps, returns and discontinuities: a spectral historiography built out of chance and oblivion, where material remains become living traces still able to question the present.
The project takes shape as both a digital archive and a book: a place of preservation and, at the same time, a space of relation, where fragments enter into dialogue through affinities, contrasts and recurrences — an archive that gives voice back to what remains, turning trace into revelation.
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