In the drawers behind the counter at Fratelli Bonvini, there are printing plates - clichés - in lead, copper and wood, accumulated across more than a century of printing for Milanese businesses. The shop is going through them: cataloguing, restoring, and digitising what each one prints. This card is from cliché no. 22 of the 1909 archive: a dance-band silhouette - musicians arranged across a stage with drums, horns and a singer at the microphone, in the visual shorthand that filled the posters and record sleeves of every Italian dance hall after the war. The original plate would only wear further if it were used to print, so Bonvini has digitised the image, cut a new magnesium matrix from the file, and pressed the design back onto paper from there. Here in printer's blue. The cliché stays in the drawer, a silent witness. The design returns to use. Exclusive to Australia.
