Our Story

Filigrane Archives was founded during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Theatres were closed.
Performances cancelled.
Tours suspended.
Our “third places”—those spaces where culture is created and shared—waited to reopen their doors.

And when creation and cultural life come to a halt, memory rises to the surface.

Every activity creates records.

Producing a live performance, making a film, writing and publishing a book, recording a music album, running an artisan workshop, managing a hotel or restaurant, leading a community project, or training for a sporting competition : every one of these activities generates documents that preserve a record of our collective and individual memory.

A fragile memory, fragmented, now largely dematerialized.
A memory that lies dormant on hard drives.

That drifts across the cloud.
That slips, unruly, through makeshift file structures.
That piles up in boxes, filing cabinets, and closets.

A reality that also affects careers, life paths, and families.

Over time, we all accumulate documents: photographs, correspondence, files, digital records, memories.

Filigrane Archives was born from this quiet urgency.

From boxes opened during a forced pause.
From forgotten hard drives plugged back in.

And from that moment when we realize we no longer know where to begin, what to keep, or how to organize it all.