An island? What island? The island of Spitsbergen, one of the northernmost in existence, I believe. The island is famous because it is home to the Global Seed Vault, a huge archive of seeds, thousands of types, amounting to over two billion. Seeds, meaning nature, agriculture, history, geography, ecology, economy, future. That’s what archives are, all of them, implying all these aspects. All archives are archives of ‘seeds’. Hence the responsibility of choice. The Internet, the archive that tends to become or appear absolute, has triggered reflection on the subject: on the one hand the potential for a 1:1 map of the territory, on the other hand the chaotic jumble that reality can also appear. But what matters are the search engines and the choices, because in many ways every archive, even the Internet, is an ‘island’.

So, here is the singular short-circuit, of the kind that only art allows itself and succeeds in realising, devised by Silvia Margaria and Gabriella Dal Lago: an idea of the future transmitted with a technology from the past. In other words, not only and not so much trust in archiving as a bet on a leap that is obsolescence. This is not to be regressive, but not fantatechnological either. Walter Benjamin used to say, later echoed by Georges Didi-Huberman as well as Rosalind Krauss, that in a technology that is overtaken and seemingly nullified by another more innovative one – and God knows if this is not continually our case at an ever-increasing acceleration – there may be in nuce, we even say in germ, a possibility of development that prefigures the one that will overtake the new one. Thus it happened that the diorama, which had completely disappeared with the birth of photography, anticipated cinema in its own way.

The slide show, an old tool of evenings spent watching those of one’s travels or family, images that we all now cram into folders on the computer and eventually watch on the screen, perhaps contains a solution that will allow us to recover the convivial dimension, of presence, of contact, that is lost with the screen. The two artists suggest this by adding dramaturgy to the projection, the word, the voice, the body, the performance. That is, on the one hand making the projection a medium, as they say, i.e. not just a tool but a form that dictates the rules of the work, and on the other hand augmenting it with dramaturgy, so as to dilate and complete the pure vision of luminous images. It is a cinema of still images, a theatre of animated images, and more, not identifiable in a specific technique. A nameless one that will find one or become another before it has one.

This is also the meaning of these images, these seeds. They are anonymous vernacular slides, neither identifiable nor traceable to any known event, scenes instead of everyday life, of people like there are millions of them in so many places around the world. The idea is not only to remind us how History is also, if not above all – not only quantitatively but qualitatively – composed of micro-stories, the lives of individuals, and what transcends them as well, but also the suggestion of understanding them precisely as the seeds of lives to come. The less we know about these people, these unknown stories, the more we count that they will bear unexpected fruit. Animated – in the proper sense of charged with a soul – by the words of the dramatisation, they are like the replanted seeds that give birth to new seedlings.

We make no secret of the fact that there is a dramatic and apocalyptic aspect to this operation, but perhaps oxymorons manage to go beyond the ends provoked. If history is moving ever more inexorably towards catastrophe, what comes next will surely have to start again, if it can, from these images rather than from those that caused the fall. In them is the life that will return: these figures are the ghosts not of yesterday but of tomorrow, the light that projects them and by which they are as it were crossed is that of the extra dimension we call future. Looking at them one by one, we have to imagine other stories, another idea, another character of history. To me, they seem so extraordinarily beautiful, of the extraordinary that permeates the ordinary and that images can reveal, even unconsciously. They are small scenes, situations, gestures, glances. Perhaps, one thinks, perhaps this random beauty is the seed of the future, islands.

Elio Grazioli

The No Carousel is artist Silvia Margaria’s private analogue vernacular photographic material collection. It consists mainly of slides recovered from forgetfulness that the artist uses to inspire her artistic research or as part of her works. Their abandonment and possible damage represent the history of these images that become a fertile space for the artist. It is an archive dedicated to that which makes resistance, that which sediments despite destruction and transformation.

The slides in The No Carousel tell of vulnerability, loss and drift and are part of this archive because they are the consequence of a choice made by someone who said no. It is a fragile archive precisely because its preservation is continually stretched on the boundary between denial and affirmation, between silence and narration, between keeping hidden and showing.