Over the years, Slam Jam, the iconic brand founded by Luca Benini in 1989, has been able to reinvent itself from a street culture leader and distribution company to a true international cultural reference point, thanks to Benini’s own multidisciplinary approach. Much more than just a streetwear company, in January 2021 Slam Jam launched the Circle platform in collaboration with 2050+, a digital think tank that gives voice to the most pressing issues of our time, with a focus on multiculturalism and climate change. The platform is open and extremely inclusive, as anyone can participate and express their thoughts.

Video shooting from Namaskàr India. Video produced by Slam Jam, directed by Giacomo Zanni and Emiliano Mazzoni - Dvd/Video Collection, 2007.

Nationhood has not only carried out an operation of the archive systematisation, in the Slam Jam’s headquarters in Ferrara, but has also designed a “hyper-photographic” online atlas where Luca Benini’s private collection — including 10,000 vinyl records that act as a soundtrack to the project — becomes a cultural resource to draw on. The archive is offered as a visual stream that confirms how lyrical chaos can be and how cyber is the symbolic space of a new digital romanticism. Nationhood has designed an infinite scroll stripe, a digital stream that combines different contents in a sequence of images creating a crash between Lo-Fi cinema and eBay aesthetics visual brutalism.

Crossing the German Border, video from Carhartt Spektra. Directed by Henrik Edelbo and David Couliau. Dvd/Video Collection, 2008.

So today, with one click, we can quickly access an archive that is the result of an underground cultural stratification that has inspired Benini from the 1980s to the present day. The result is a new digital collector on the anthropology of look and the underground subcultures whose founder has been a founding presence: the clubbing of the Adriatic coast, London and NY in the early 1990s, up to the international hip-hop scene and the Japan fashion neo-avant-gardes in the 1990s.

Tre risvegli in tre tempi by Gian Berto Vanni 1969 - Dvd from The Cube Bookzine, Issue 4 by Sartoria, 2004.