CULTURE       25.02.21

ARCHIVIO SLAM JAM

Photographies from Slam Jam's archive

Over 30 years since its establishment, Slam Jam, street culture brand leader, is opening the doors of its archive for the first time with an exclusive project devised by Nationhood. The project comprises a new location in Slam Jam's headquarters in Ferrara, and a consultable online atlas stemming from an experimental publishing plan focused on the brand's cultural heritage.

Formerly the private collection of Slam Jam founder, Luca Benini, this ultra-refined pastiche of eighties-to-the-present-day underground culture is now a new cultural resource with its own digital platform, a long list of publishing products, and various offline off-shoot activities hinging around visual art and culture.

Nationhood has designed an infinite scroll, a digital flow that unites different contents in a sequence of images which is a collision of Lo-Fi cinema and “eBay aesthetics” visual brutalism.
The upshot is a new digital device collecting the anthropology of the look and underground subcultures of which Luca Benini was a founding presence: from clubbing on the Riviera Romagnola, London and early nineties NY, to the international hip-hop scene and Japan's noughties fashion neo-avant-garde. Once again, Nationhood takes the idea of the archive apart and talks of how customs are the cultural custodian of the contemporary world. And so it has designed a hyper-photographic atlas mixed with soundscapes from the around 10,000 vinyls in the collection, offering up the archive in a visual stream that confirms the potential lyricism of chaos and cyberspace as the symbolic place of a new digital romanticism.

  • BAPE x Original Fake chomper varsity jacket, collaboration between A Bathing Ape and Kaws, 2005.
  • Luca Benini, MODE 2, Futura 2000 and Alberto Scabbia in Modena during “Defumo” event, a dedicated performance with street artists who acted upon the walls against their planned demolition. The event was supported by Slam Jam, 2001.
  • Stone Island raincoat jacket 1983. Luca and his cats - wearing the raincoat - Ferrara, 1984.
  • Luca Benini, MODE 2, Futura 2000 and Alberto Scabbia in Modena during “Defumo” event, a dedicated performance with street artists who acted upon the walls against their planned demolition. The event was supported by Slam Jam, 2001.
  • Fax from Luca Benini to Fraser Cooke,1996.
  • Slam Jam business card by ZeroT, Ferrara 1989.
  • Slam Jam 1962: Luca’s birth year is the sign of the tiger in the Chinese horoscope - test logo print, 1998.
  • Slam Jam varsity jacket designed for Slam Jam team in 1993.
  • Carhartt WIP "Luxury Hurts" t-shirt SS 2013 - Photo by Marco Marzocchi - Luca’s car without wheels at HQ, Ferrara.
  • Video shooting from Namaskàr, India. Video produced by Slam Jam, directed by Giacomo Zanni and Emiliano Mazzoni, 2007.
  • Part of the vast Slam Jam skateboards collection, including Supreme x Andrei Molodkin “Fuck Bush” collaboration, 2004.
  • Stickers by Fergus “Fergadelic” Purcell x Proud 2bea sticker book. Sponsored by Slam Jam 2006
  • “You are next” Fuct t-shirt, 1994.