Reinventario is a neologism I made out of the two words "reinvent" and "inventory".
Reinventario is the recording of memories linked to a place in order to create ideas that can transform it. Bormioli glass factory was one of the industrial poles around which Parma's San Leonardo neighborhood developed. Once the factory closed, the neighborhood remained the ghetto of the city. The club of ex-workers has kept alive the relationships and struggles for which they were known in the Italian trade union and progressive scene at the end of the 60s.
Taken over by the Municipality but abandoned and subsequently privatized, the industrial archeology was not demolished thanks to the commitment of the former workers and finally recognized as a heritage building to be preserved and restored.
Today, a Glass Museum is being planned, conceived and managed collectively by the ex-workers union to develop a cultural center in the building, which can be both a social and integration center. All the objects, machinery, photographs and archival documents that have been recovered are now in a warehouse, where they periodically meet to reorganize, and inventory the colected memories.
This interstitial space between the history of a place and its transformation into a heritage site, inspired the photographic project, which reflects on how historical memories become institutional and asks who decides how to hand them down and
reinvent them. Playing with the images of the past and the preserved objects of the former workers' association, the project aims to restore an identity to a "mistreated" area of the city and to recreate a gesture of care-taking of a precious collective memory, which can eventually be reinvented and adapted to the needs of the contemporary place.
The scraps of the factory, huge glass stones that sedimented in the production, are the character through which the narrative develops: an object that may or may not seem precious depending on the gaze with which it is seen and reproduced.