Behind That Locked Door: Archives Between Hoarding and Surveillance

The essay explores the space of the archives through a collection of photographs taken within Milanese archives in the autumn of 2024. The collateral text further elaborates on the contradictory nature of these spaces, both repositories of memory and instruments of control. The research invites us to consider how archives attempt to contain the flow of time, bridging past and future while compressing entropy within their ordered settings. As we stroll by shelves and file cabinets, we notice an obsessive impulse to accumulate and control information – an echo of our data driven society. Case studies selected are meant to represent archival architecture across various fields and institutions. Photographs preferably adopt a central perspective to ease comparison among images and with the human scale, while drawings deconstruct the device character of the archive. Furthermore, archivists’ testimonies serve as the primary reference for insights into these spaces where the past is preserved, the present controlled, and the future designed.