What if theatre archives could do more than preserve the past? In Castrovillari, the ARCHILIVES partners were exploring how digitisation, storytelling and immersive technologies can bring theatre heritage back to life and open it up to new audiences.
On 16–17 September 2026, the partners of the ARCHILIVES project met in Calabria, for the 3rd ARCHILIVES Project Meeting, hosted by Primavera dei Teatri Cultural Association.
During the two-day meeting, partners reviewed the latest developments and progress of the project’s core activities. More than a coordination meeting, the event became an important technical and creative working session, bringing together project teams and experts in digitisation, audiovisual production and immersive technologies.
The discussions further strengthened cross-border cooperation between the partners and helped align the different technical activities around a shared objective: bringing the archives of Italian and Greek theatres back to life through digital tools, new forms of storytelling and immersive experiences.
Across the four partner theatres, Koreja Theatre, Primavera dei Teatri, the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Agrinio, and the Municipal and Regional Theatre of Corfu, work is progressing on the selection, cataloguing and digitisation of archival items. In parallel, metadata are being developed so that these materials can eventually be searched, connected and accessed through the future digital archive.
But ARCHILIVES is not only about digitising and preserving documents. The project also explores how archival materials can be transformed into narratives capable of conveying the history, identity and memory of each theatre. In this framework, partners are developing video narratives using storytelling to give new meaning and visibility to the collections.
The Castrovillari meeting also offered the opportunity to discuss the next stages of the Living Archive Model, an activity that will create a more direct connection between archives and people by involving those who have experienced, created or contributed to the history of the theatres, and bringing personal memories, testimonies and stories into dialogue with the archival heritage.
A further step in this transformation will be the development of a Joint AR Landing Room conceived as an immersive experience capable of connecting physical theatre spaces with digitised archival content through interactive and augmented/mixed-reality technologies.
