Stefano Giovanazzi: AAC Contemporary Art Archive Rovereto. Documents on contemporary art and thought

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aac Archive of Contemporary Art is a project born in the early 1980s. Designed, created, and maintained by Stefano Giovanazzi, aac is a collection of 200,000 documents conceived, written, and published primarily by artists, critics, and art historians, but also by writers, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and epistemologists. The materials come from Italian and international artists, publishers, institutions, and collectors and are largely dedicated to artistic research as well as reflections on the conditions of contemporary life.
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Born from a deep desire to collect and preserve the testimonies of the movements and protagonists of 20th-century art and to actively participate in promoting contemporary artists, over time the project has expanded to include materials from many other disciplines. Thus, from its beginnings in the early 1980s in Venice during the formative experience at the Academy of Fine Arts, in contact with highly active figures in the international scene such as Emilio Vedova and Luigi Nono, and then in Rovereto through a multitude of curatorial experiences that fostered a clear awareness of contemporary issues, particularly through activities promoted within the festival “Senzatitolo. Events, Actions, Exhibitions,” the flow of acquisitions never ceased; in fact, it accelerated over time. Certainly, the richness of art events between the 1990s and the early years of the new millennium allowed the collection to be enriched with documents of absolute theoretical and critical importance and contributed to making the collection a complex and articulated whole, well-organized from the perspective of disciplines and bibliographic cataloging. Encounters with the protagonists of the artistic experiences of those years, and with some of the most important figures of contemporary philosophical and literary thought and reflection — from Joseph Kosuth to Illja Kabakov, from Giuseppe Panza di Biumo to Giuliano Gori, from Michael Snow to Stefano Boeri, from Benoît Mandelbrot to Daniele Del Giudice to Paolo de Benedetti — shed light on an extremely lively national and international panorama, rich in reflections and proposals regarding both the creative dimension and the human condition in general.

The activity carried out over these three decades has allowed us to weave a network of international relationships with a wide variety of authors: artists, creatives, gallerists, museum directors, collectors, publishers, and so on, and consequently with numerous institutions: museums, foundations, research centers, residencies, alternative spaces, and associations. These relationships have enabled us to redefine, at least partially, the environment of the art world and the world of thought: today, as a result of this experience, a database contains more than 130,000 contacts in over 150 countries worldwide, a testament to the persistence of relationships beyond the unpredictable events that inevitably involve the lives of individuals, which can perhaps be considered antithetical to the growing ‘dematerialization’ of practices related to the art world and culture in general.

The Contemporary Art Archive AAC is a documentation center that has a collection exceeding 200,000 documents, acquired starting from the mid-1980s, mainly dedicated to art, design, architecture, philosophy, and contemporary thought. To date, the following have been indexed:

• 105,000 printed documents: monographs, periodicals, sound recordings.
  Instead, the following need to be cataloged:
• 10,000 other printed documents.
• 50,000 “minor” materials or gray literature: invitations, brochures, posters, press kits. Among these materials is a very rare collection of exhibition invitations held between the 1960s and 1970s by artists active in the fields of conceptual art, minimalism, and Povera.
• 3,000 sound and video recordings: vinyl records, magnetic tapes, CDs, CDRs, DVDs;
• 600 works of art: paintings, drawings, photographs, but mainly graphic works, multiples, and limited edition prints, numbered and signed by the artists.
• 2,000 posters: among these, some very rare, created in the 1920s by artists belonging to the historical avant-gardes.
• 5,000 original photographic documents: F.lli Alinari Archive Florence, Pavilions at the International Art Exhibition “La Biennale di Venezia,” Francesca Cristellotti Digital Photo Archive, Rovereto.
  The archive also contains other types of printed documents: maps, postcards, religious images (holy cards), totaling several thousand.

Works in collection: artist multiples, posters, books, records

Vincenzo Agnetti, Joseph Albers, Robert Barry, Ubaldo Bartolini, Carlo Battaglia, Duccio Berti, Alighiero Boetti, Agostino Bonalumi, Achille Bonito Oliva, Silvano Brugnara, Daniel Buren, Pierpaolo Calzolari, Nicola Carrino, Giuseppe Chiari, Alfred L. Copley, Enzo Cucchi, Gino De Dominicis, Hamish Fulton, Alberto Garutti, Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Kosuth/Sarah Charlesworth, Urs Lüthi, Ugo La Pietra, Bertrand Lavier, Felice Levini, Sol Lewitt, Sergio Lombardo, Arrigo Lora Totino, Robert Mangold, Amedeo Martegani, Fausto Melotti, Elio Mariani, Maurizio Mochetti, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, , Bruce Nauman, Mario Nigro, Dennis Oppenheim, Giulio Paolini, Umberto Postal, Emilio Prini, Niki de Saint Phalle, Remo Salvadori, Maria Salvati, Lucas Samaras, Antonio Trotta, Tim Ulrichs, Bernard Venet, Claudio Verna, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Heimo Zobernig.

Stefano Giovanazzi

Graduated from the Rovereto (TN) Magistral Institute and subsequently from the State Institute of Art in Trento. In the early 1980s, he attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where he earned his diploma in Painting with artist Emilio Vedova. Founder and curator of AAC Contemporary Art Archive of Rovereto, since 1994 he has been president of the cultural association Numero Civico. Over more than thirty years of activity, he has curated hundreds of events related to contemporary art and thought. He has numerous collaborations with artists, musicians, writers, museums, cultural institutions, academies, governments, and governmental bodies. He has worked with Mario Airò, Stefano Arienti, Vincenzo Cabiati, Andrea Crociani, Francesco Dal Bosco, Eva Marisaldi, Chiyoko Miura, Liliana Moro, Fabio Polvani, Luca Quartana, Andrea Rabbiosi, Federico Tanzi-Mira, Grazia Toderi, Marco Vaglieri, Vedova Mazzei, Francesco Voltolina; curated exhibitions featuring works by Rita Ackermann, Richard Ambleton, John Currin, Joseph Kosuth, Sean Landers, Sherrie Levine, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Jim Shaw, Jeffrey Wallace. He has organized events in collaboration with the Italian Senate, Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Canadian Embassy, Basque Government (Spain), Cervantes Institute of Culture (Spain), The British Council (UK), French Ministry of Culture, Institut Français (France), Goethe Institute (Germany). As a genealogist, he manages an extensive genealogical archive, “The Trees and the Leaves,” which contains over one million genealogical entries.

Archivio Arte Contemporanea
329 4828149
https://www.stefanogiovanazzi.eu
info@stefanogiovanazzi.eu