The Factory & its Memories.
The Factory & its Memories
Cripta747 Studio Program, Turin
2019
With Gaetano Donato, Archivio Tipografico and Vilém Flusser
The Factory & its Memories gathers the writing, research, and interviews produced through an investigation into the defunct Nebiolo Type Foundry, undertaken 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 factory closed abruptly in 1978, unable to adapt to new printing technologies—an artefact of the mid-twentieth-century Italian industrial miracle and a cautionary account of the outmoded factory at once.
Its subject is the legacy every factory leaves behind, and in Nebiolo’s case that legacy is typographic: the typefaces produced by its creative studio, which encoded the social and political climate of their moment and remain open to new meanings as designers continue to use these forms today. The publication brings together contributions from the ex-Nebiolo worker Gaetano Donato and Archivio Tipografico, writing and research of my own, and a reprint of Vilém Flusser’s essay The Factory, courtesy of Reaktion Books, London.
