Photography Between Artwork and Document. Archives, Photography Complex, and Women’s History
30 January 2026 @ 10:00 - 17:00
Photography Between Artwork and Document. Archives, Photography Complex, and Women’s History
Friday, January 30, 2026
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan
Venue: CIB – Centro Internazionale di Brera, Via Formentini 10 – Milan
On Friday, January 30, 2026, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera will host the seminar Photography Between Artwork and Document. Archives, Photography Complex, and Women’s History, a day of study and discussion dedicated to the relationship between photography, archives, and practices of memory construction.
The initiative marks the conclusion of the project PRIN 2022 PNRR Fotografiste: Women in Photography from Italian Archives, 1839–1939, funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU and promoted by the Scuola IMT Alti Studi Lucca and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. The project aims to enhance the accessibility and knowledge of photographic archives, promoting a paradigm shift intended to restore visibility and centrality to female figures in the history of photography, often excluded from official canons, and to bring to light material and immaterial heritage that remains largely unexplored.
The meeting develops around the concept of photography complex, elaborated by James L. Hevia, which defines photography as an articulated system of subjects, instruments, materials, institutions, and practices involved in the production, circulation, and preservation of images. This perspective allows for moving beyond an exclusively aesthetic reading of the photographic work, connecting artistic, archival, and productive dimensions and opening new possibilities for critical analysis, including in relation to women’s contribution.
Building on this theoretical framework, the morning session, titled Rethinking Photography Through Milan Unit by Ramak Fazel, aims to promote a discussion on the archival and cataloging standards currently in use for photography, questioning their assumptions in light of artistic practices that challenge traditional distinctions between artwork, document, and archive.
The discussion will open with a reflection on the work Milan Unit (1994–2009) by Ramak Fazel, which documents the photographer’s studio during his time in Milan. The ensemble includes contact sheets, prints, administrative documents, notes, as well as shelving, ornaments, and containers: material elements of the working environment that reflect its everyday and productive dimension. Preserved in fluorescent green modules, the archive—which has become an artwork and was recently acquired by MAXXI—functions as an exhibition device and, at the same time, as a critical object that invites us to rethink photographic work in its processual dimension and the ordering systems that regulate its memory. The roundtable will continue with contributions from Simona Antonacci (MAXXI Architettura e Design contemporaneo, Rome), Annalisa Rossi (Director, Ministry of Culture), and Alessandro Coco (Gabinetto Fotografico Nazionale, ICCD).
In the afternoon, a second roundtable will take place, The Archives of the Women’s Movement, dedicated to the role of archives and documentation centers in the construction, preservation, and transmission of the historical memory of Italian feminism from the 1970s onward. Through contributions from Elena Musiani (Archivio di storia delle donne, Bologna), Giovanna Olivieri (Archivia, Rome), Adriana Perrotta Rabissi (Libera Università delle Donne, Milan), Raffaella Poletti and Maria Rosaria Moccia (Fondazione “Elvira Badaracco” Studi e documentazione delle donne – ETS, Milan), the roundtable aims to initiate a reflection on the construction of the memory and history of a movement, such as the women’s movement, which emerged partly from a rupture with the past and, at certain moments, from an awareness of the irretrievability of women’s history, defined by Carla Lonzi as the “dark past of the world.”
Building on this awareness, the meeting will focus on the conditions that made it possible to conceive and practice a memory of the movement, on the objectives that guided its construction, and on the way in which, through archives, history has been and continues to be interpreted, not in a perspective of linear recovery of a lost tradition, but as an opportunity for reworking and re-signification from the present.