Modalities for the Preservation and the Valorization of the Performing Arts Cultural Heritage: the Case LAFLIS (Living Archive – Floating Islands)

The paper aims to analyze, both from an archival-documentary and museological-expository point of view, the documentation center Laflis (Living Archive - Floating Islands), which from July 2022 has found its location at the Biblioteca Bernardini in Lecce. The center preserves historical documentation relating to the life and works of Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret, Third Theatre and theatre group meetings, the Magdalena Project and Ista (International School of Theatre Anthropology) sessions. In this context, the dynamics of preservation and conservation are combined with a valorization implemented by an artistic language, whereby props and archival documents become fundamental components within installation spaces and are enjoyed in another form by the spectator/visitor. This circumstance, in addition to pointing out various ontological issues, thus relating to the intangible nature of the performance event, undermines the deontological canons of the archival science discipline and museology, i.e. the regulatory practices usually employed to guarantee the protection and preservation of materials. The article wants to indicate possible strategies to protect props as cultural heritage and to ensure that these objects, although re-proposed to the public through an artistic language, are at the same time preserved as tangible traces of cultural practices and expressions, and thus of intangible cultural heritage, in order to actively pursue the safeguarding, protection and valorization measures suggested by Unesco in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), and in the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (2005).