AN EXPERIMENTAL POSTER-BOOK ARCHIVE
OF MINERALS AND MEMORIES
CH / 2017
Archive Minerals
The starting point is a personal collection of 350 minerals, collected from when I was 7 until I was 23 years old. The rocks, dif ferently from the one visible in a scientific museum are not archived by only scientific-based characteristics like size, crystal composition or geographical background.
Every piece of rock is connected to a memory, from 1 to 4 in which 1 is the strongest connection to the collection given to me by my grandfather to rocks which are only empty beauties. Through the act of unfolding the poster, first is seen the feature of the rocks and the specific memory of each rock is hidden. The memories are shown by the use of old pictures, by the creation of
illustrations, of stories and of unexpected compositions accompanied by little questions at the bottom of the page. It is a transitory collection because the process of creation of rocks requires a period of time which is more than the full life cycle of a human, and also by being in this moment the collection and the memories attached to the rocks are temporary and volatile.
The archive catalogue is composed by 17 posters double-face, 4 A0 poster of the full collections of minerals and the original forms compiled by hand conteining the informations about the rocks and it’s memories.
The front is always a rock and it’s details..
The inside/back is always a different poster story reflecting the relationship of the rock with the owner.
In this case, the blue-transparent rock was a gift from my brother, and the poster is a narration of an imaginary trip.
The posters were developed from a first archive colleciton of images, texts, descriptions of situations, places, narrations around every rock. More than 60 forms were made and from that only 17 posters-bokklets were created as a final selection.
︎ This is Arianna's visual archive: an incomplete constellation of projects, traces, and experiments.
I'm a Polish-Italian designer working at the intersection of visual research, systemic transitions, and ecological imagination. At Dark Matter Labs I move between roles depending on what a project needs: visual sensemaking, design strategy, narrative direction. My practice is always collaborative, shaped by the people and places I work with, and by a stubborn curiosity about how things are made, who they are for, and who gets to shape them.
Outside of DML, I perform with a theremin in the sound duo Younger Siblings, and I carry with me the education philosophy I helped build at La Scuola Open Source in Bari, where I once directed the education programme: learning as a collective, failure as method, permission not to know.
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This website is an archive: part memory, part method, part map. It isn’t intended as a formal portfolio. For that, reach out to my human version.
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Projects are intentionally scattered rather than sorted. Some are dense, complex ecosystems that unfolded over months or years. Others are small but charged with meaning. I’ll soon add a diagram to map them by complexity, scope, ethics, impact, methodology, and who collaborated with me on what.
Scrolling the image gallery you’ll find research inquiries, commissioned freelance work, poetic interventions, and pieces made in response to real and imagined futures. Some are made for people, some with them ︎︎︎ and some are dedicated to beings with many legs, wings, or forgotten stories.
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The projects speak many languages as the involved partners: Italian, English, French, Polish, Dutch, Icelandic, German mostly, but not only. Full credits are on their way. Nothing here was made alone. ︎
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This site isn’t super user-friendly yet. A more accessible and funkier version is planned for 2026-27.
