Our Studio Is the City. Local Broadcasting and Political Information in the Archives of Videogruppo Piemonte

Abstract

The article explores the history and editorial ethos of Videogruppo Piemonte, a local television channel active in Turin between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, situating it within Italy’s post-deregulation media landscape. Founded by Sergio Rogna Manassero, Videogruppo embodied a civic, community-oriented model encapsulated in the slogan “Our studio is the city”. Programmes such as Cronache Torinesi and La città domanda, risponde il sindaco configured proximity and participation through direct contact with viewers, limited mediation, and site-specific work. Anchored in the surviving archive—a dispersed corpus of U-matic tapes, administrative records, and “grey” documentation—the study reads these materials as both record and remainder, an index of the contingent conditions under which local television operated. Their fragile, fragmentary state is integral to the argument, showing how Videogruppo’s editorial experiment was grounded in civic engagement yet marked by structural precarity. Tracing the interplay between practice and material survival, the article reflects on how local television articulated forms of public discourse and democratic presence that now persist chiefly via archival residues, prompting a rescaling from institutional narratives to the improvisational textures of local media memory.