VOL. 4 MILLELIRE

For the Expanded Edition 00 Vol. 04 “MILLELIRE”, XEROXED looked at what is at the literal margins of seven archival underground publications, meaning at the angles, sides, and bottoms of their pages. These areas of the page layout often hosted advertisements, promotions, and announcements. Despite being independent in their nature and circulating outside mainstream channels, some of the more established underground press titles found their economic compromise in hosting ads from disco clubs, bars, and youth culture fashion shops. It is interesting to see how these ads often adapted to the underground publications’ visuals and slangs, employing rough graphics, goth typefaces, and adopting an ironic take on the advertised product.

For the Vol. 04 of the Pamphlet T-shirt series, XEROXED extracted ads from seven different Italian countercultural publications covering a time span that goes from 1983 to 1986. The selection includes titles like Ario (1991), Codici Immaginari (1993), and Babilonia (1983). The above-mentioned publications belong to different movements and have varied visual languages but share an ideologically careful approach to the selection and handling of paid advertisements.

Most of the activities of the extracted ads do not exist anymore or have changed their nature, making underground publications important historical documents and time capsules keeping memories of no longer existing night clubs, vinyl shops, and boutiques that shaped the attitude(s) and aesthetic(s) of underground movements.

The XEROXED Expanded Edition Vol. 04 transforms the space of the T-shirt in a pamphlet, and the body in a walking banner decontextualized from its time, preserving the graphics, typefaces, logos, and visual languages of that period.