Opening the drawers, boxes and cupboards of the Pirri Studio-Archives, I unexpectedly found myself reliving my childhood experience of analogue and manual time travel, triggered by the action of pressing those two magic buttons: RWD and FWD. Not only does the material conserved by the artist – illustrating his artistic modus operandi and testimony to a past inscribed in Italian cultural history – take our thoughts back in time, it also allows us to veer towards a time yet to come, opening up a past that always hints at a potential future.

The sketches, workbooks, models and photographs speak of a creative moment in the past but form a bridge to a potential future action, underlining the intellectual and stylistic consistency that distinguishes the artist’s wide-ranging work, not only in the visual arts but also in theatre, architecture and graphic design, all inseparable disciplines in constant dialogue in Pirri’s poetic. After all, as Jacques Derrida taught us in Archive Fever (1995), despite a gaze that is seemingly looking back, the archive is always dominated by a sense of the future, a desire for eternity that reaches beyond death.

Seen as a place showcasing the transient nature of things, exposed to both memory and, potentially, oblivion, one of the main characteristics of archives is that they are experienced as a place that accumulates, retrieves and conserves historical knowledge and memory forms. Dutifully created by public institutions but, first and foremost, by the will of individuals and groups, the archive differs from the collection or library in that it constitutes a depository or ordered system of documents and testimonies, both verbal and visual, that forms the base for constructing history. According to Foucault, the archive governs the said and the unsaid, the recorded and the omitted, and the aim of the knowledge archaeologist is to learn about the past via its material remainders, retrieving and reconstructing the archive to show how it can shape the construction of a historical meaning.