Telling the Territory through the Archive. For a Recovery of the Documentary Production of Rai Puglia

This paper, developed within the PRIN 2022 PNRR project “Telling the Territory. The documentary production of local television broadcasters in Calabria and Apulia”, focuses on the documentary production of RAI Puglia. Through systematic archival work – conducted using RAI’s internal Multimedia Catalog and the viewing of over fifty hours of Betamax footage – the study reconstructs the modes, themes, and authorship of regional production during the late 1970s and mid-1980s, a phase shaped by the decentralising effects of the 1975 RAI Reform and the launch of Rete 3. The analysis centres on two main axes: representations of everyday life (rituals, customs, community practices) and the depiction of territorial spaces (natural, urban, industrial, historical). The findings highlight both the cultural value and the formal richness of this largely neglected corpus, while also exposing the critical issues of incomplete metadata, fragile supports, and limited accessibility. The presentation argues for the urgent need to reorganise and digitise regional audiovisual archives and emphasises the role that collaborations between public broadcasters and universities can play in preserving and reactivating this heritage as a resource for cultural memory and public engagement.