This essay shuttles between the archive in its literal sense as a site of storage, and in its figurative senses as a migrating, foundational concept that is fused with affect and speaks of memory and forgetting, disavowal and betrayals. I maintain that a productive ground for theorising the archive as a site of radical public teaching can be found in the public pedagogical projects of anti-mafia activists currently working in Sicily. In the following pages, I focus on the photojournalism of Sicilian anti-mafia activist Letizia Battaglia. Bound up with traditions of social documentary and autobiography, Battaglia's collection of over 6000 photographs of the mafia's internal war in Sicily works as a moving, portable archive that takes place at the breakdown of memory and challenges the world to understand organised crime as far more than Sicily's "local problem". Drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Masud Khan and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, I argue that Battaglia's photographic archive creates a social protective shield that exemplifies how archives can psychically and physically protect communities who have suffered societal trauma by expanding the arc of remembering and, in turn, challenge the state repression of memory.