Fondazione Nebbia

Nebbia, an archive that reads like a magazine

Forty years of contemporary art, finally readable by someone who is not a scholar.

Client: Fondazione Nebbia
Year: 2024
Industry: Culture
Services: Visual identity, Digital design, Art direction

Context

Fondazione Nebbia holds eight thousand works, forty thousand documents and a library nobody consulted. The previous site was a database built in 2009 for researchers, and it served them perfectly well.

The board wanted to open the archive to a wider audience without turning it into a container for explainer content.

The challenge

An archive cannot be rewritten. The records were written in a technical language layered over fifteen years, and rewriting them would have cost the precision that makes them useful.

So the way in had to change, not the content: reading paths built on top of the catalogue, without touching the catalogue.

The approach

We designed two readings of the same data. One is field search, unchanged, for people who know what they are looking for. The other is a series of curated dossiers that cut across the catalogue by theme and run about twelve minutes each.

Typography does almost all the work: one typeface, seven grades, and the discipline not to add colour where space is enough.

Dossiers on top of the catalogue

Each dossier is an edit: works, letters, installation photographs and technical records sequenced by a curator. The system generates nothing automatically, and that was a decision.

The team publishes one dossier a month. After the first year there are twenty-two, and seven have been cited by publications that had never covered the foundation before.

Results

×6: Archive sessionsfirst year
9:40: Average time on dossiersagainst 0:48 on records
22: Dossiers publishedwith no outside help

For the first time the archive is being read by people who are not researchers. That is the result we had been after for years.
Marco Bellandi · Director · Fondazione Nebbia