The Buchner Boxes begins with the carefully preserved remains of an archaeological excavation on Ischia, an island where Giorgio Buchner spent five decades tracing the history of the first Greek colony in the western Mediterranean. Luigi Spina photographs the contents of Buchner’s wooden cases and their smaller fitted cardboard boxes: teeth, bones, skull fragments, organic matter, soil, and the modest objects once associated with human and animal lives three thousand years ago.
The book’s force lies in the tension between scientific order and intimate material presence. Fibulas, vases, hairpins, armlets, rings, lead weights, fishing hooks, oil lamps, and a baby bottle appear alongside earth discoloured by time. These are not presented as a neutral inventory. Their arrangement preserves the acts of excavation, classification, protection, and memory that allow archaeological evidence to speak. Spina’s photographs make the boxes themselves part of the subject, turning storage into a quiet theatre of history.
Time is layered throughout the collection. Buchner wrapped objects in newspaper pages supplied by his German, English, and Italian archaeological community—bearing traces of elections, wars, and the first moon landing—while other remains were kept in illustrated matchboxes. Ancient lives therefore meet the everyday paper culture of the twentieth century, and the logic of the archive becomes inseparable from imagination and circumstance.
Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2014, this 80-page hardcover contains 45 trichrome illustrations and is presented in French and Italian. For a serious collector, its distinction is not simply archaeological subject matter, but the precision of its photographic attention: a compact collaboration between excavation history, vernacular storage, and contemporary book-making, in which small, fragile evidence is given sustained visual and intellectual weight.
