The Factory & its Memories.

The Factory & its Memories
Cripta747 Studio Program, Turin
25 June – 25 July 2019

The Factory & its Memories focused on the defunct Nebiolo Type Foundry, the subject of a research residency in the 2019 Cripta747 Studio Program in Turin. Located only 800 metres from the Cripta747 studio, and now occupied by a local government office, the semi-derelict Nebiolo factory stands as an artefact of the mid-twentieth-century Italian industrial miracle; its abrupt closure in 1978, brought on by an inability to adapt to new printing technologies, stands equally as a cautionary account of what becomes of the outmoded factory.

Every factory leaves some legacy of production, and in Nebiolo’s case that legacy is the typefaces produced by its creative studio—a visual language for the social and political climate in which they were made, and one that remains open to new contexts and connotations as designers continue to use these forms in digital form today. Working from this starting point, I collaborated with local typographers, archivists, former Nebiolo employees, and academics to produce a publication of writing, research, and interviews (see the publication of the same name), with contributions from the ex-Nebiolo worker Gaetano Donato and Archivio Tipografico, and a reprint of Vilém Flusser’s essay The Factory, courtesy of Reaktion Books, London.