"Aldo Mieli" Documentation Center
Location CENTRO
Queer archive
The Aldo Mieli Documentation Center was established in Carrara in August 2021 as a natural evolution of Luca Locati Luciani's "domestic" archive, which has finally reached its ideal form, open to the public and available to anyone conducting research on LGBTQIA+ topics.
The documentation center is dedicated to Aldo Mieli, a pioneer of sexual and homosexual liberation in the 1920s, who was associated with pre-homophile movements in Germany.
This choice is a tribute to a figure who is still relatively unknown in the LGBTQIA+ community, someone who paid the price for being Jewish and homosexual in an Italy already subservient to the fascist regime. Mieli chose self-imposed exile abroad starting in 1928. However, the attention to history is not, according to the collective managing the documentation center, something that should remain detached from the present, but rather it is accompanied by a constant curiosity about ongoing socio-cultural changes.
The idea of transforming a personal archive into a publicly accessible institution arises from the belief that research, regardless of its subject matter, should be made as easy as possible by those who preserve historical documentation.
The documentation center is located in the central Piazza Alberica in Carrara, a city deeply connected to its history of anti-fascism.
Currently, the premises are still being set up, and soon work will begin on cataloging the approximately 6,000 books, 10,000 magazines, and countless leaflets, posters, and memorabilia that constitute the true core of the documentation center.
Staff:
Luca Locati Luciani
We’ll be taking part in Carrara Studi Aperti again this year.
On Saturday, June 7, and Sunday, June 8, from 3:30 PM to 8:00 PM, you’re welcome to visit us at our venue in Piazza Alberica 11, Carrara.
On Saturday, June 7, at 8:00 PM in Piazza delle Erbe, we will finally present Paradigma Lemebel by Ariase Barretta (Asterisco Edizioni).
The author will be present, in conversation with Eleonora Santamaria.
The event is held in collaboration with the Melville Bookstore.
In Paradigma Lemebel, Ariase Barretta offers a reinterpretation of Pedro Lemebel’s work as an expression of Transmodernity, as well as a reflection of desire and the constant need — on the part of the Chilean writer and artist — to resist the structural order imposed by conformity, above all that of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Pedro Lemebel, in fact, represents the perfect embodiment of a post-identity deconstruction that asserts itself in open dissent with the dictatorship of the norm.
A transmodern reading of his work reveals elements that resonate with major critical theories, carrying a strong revolutionary character, but also suggesting a possible reformulation of archetypal pansexual forms — predating all modern definitions — archaic and proto-queer in nature.
Ariase Barretta was born in Naples. He earned his degree from the Istituto Orientale in Naples and continued his studies at the universities of Modena, Barcelona, and Madrid, where he completed a PhD in Latin American Literature.
He is the author of the novels Litany (2010), Darkene (2012), Psicosintesi della forma insetto (2014), H dalle sette piaghe (2015), Living Fleshlight (2018), all published by Meridiano Zero, and Cantico dell’abisso (2021 – Arkadia Editore).
In 2018, together with performer Manuela Maroli, he founded the performative literature duo Sacrificium Viduae, with whom he created the works Luce di carne viva and Le lacrime di Venere.
He has translated works by André Gide, Torcuato Luca de Tena, Caroline Graham, and Bentley Little, and curated the Italian edition of the Slapstick Encyclopedia, the most important collection of silent films produced in the first thirty years of the twentieth century.
The author has chosen to donate his royalties to the non-profit organization Animal Equality.