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Promoting and presenting archives in a way that makes them a reassuring and easily accessible context is a primary concern for archivists, who are used to working in a field driven by communication. This paper offers a reflection on models and methods of transmitting and promoting documentary collections, while drawing inspiration from recent works that propose new perspectives on the question and its forms of presentation. Does a clear distinction between the established descriptive tradition and the so-called alternative approaches still make sense? Perhaps the two approaches are much more interconnected and stable than previously thought. Are research tools “healthy carriers” of narrative? It seems so. Alongside descriptive practices, the paper will compare some effective museum practices aimed at presenting archives and highlighting the specific cultural value that archives actively preserve. From a broader perspective, after a period of great success, narratives are now in crisis. To quote Byung-Chul Han, «At the core of this noisy storytelling lies a narrative void, manifesting itself as a lack of meaning and a loss of direction». Maybe archives can offer a different interpretative and descriptive key.

“Archive” comes from the Ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον, “house of the ruler”: inside, we find what corresponds to the normative framework; outside, everything that dissents and is not conform. This occurs for the heteropatriarchal archive of intimate partner violence, as it is explored by Carmen Maria Machado in In the Dream House (2019), and for the archive of folklore, ruled by each (re-)teller’s framework. What if we regain the oral dimension of the tale tradition in a diffractive perspective? What if the reader entangles with the text, co-creating a new meaning? In this paper, I propose to shed a light on the possibilities of diffracting the folkloric archive, to shift the archival-ruled narratives in the direction of self-representation and empoderamiento for the subjectivities expelled from the archival narratives. Two are the paths proposed: firstly, situated literary retellings, with a focus on Machado’s memoir; and secondly, wild pedagogy and slow scholarship methodologies and practices, enabling the experience of the reader to entangle with and diffract the tales’ narratives.

Te paper reconstructs the genesis of the ‘Centro di iniziativa giuridica Piero Calamandrei’ Foundation, from the initiative of the Radical Party to its progressive autonomy. After outlining the characteristic features of its statutory purposes, the Author highlights the main actions of the Foundation, among which the very recent publication in open access of the ten hard-to-find volumes of Calamandrei’s Opere giuridiche, edited by Mauro Cappelletti, stands out.