La Vetta e L’Abisso: carrara

Abstract

La Vetta e L’Abisso is a sequence of photographs which address the problems associated with over-mining in the famous white marble mines of Carrara, Tuscany. As a visual essay, the series attempts to undercut contemporary notions of the sublime in the documentation of mineral extractivism, which has been dominant in recent years due to the popularity of photographers such as Edward Burtynsky. Furthermore, the title of the essay, and the display of the monochrome large format photographs with the addition of a gold-selenium tone, alludes to eco-Marxist notions of commodity fetishism and social alienation, which underpin the exploitative logic of capitalist (re-)production. Drawing on the authors previously published critical commentaries on the qualities of photography and environmental activism, this essay proposes an approach to praxis which undercuts the distant passivity of the sublime in favour of encountering the negative effects of extractivism first-hand.

Introduction

In Italy at the outset of the 20th century, the anarchist Alberto Meschi fought against the exploitation of labour by campaigning for an 8-hour working day (Figure 1). Today, the exploitation of the white marble mines by modern mining techniques is altering the micro-climate of the region, as whole mountains quite literally disappear from view. More than one hundred marble quarries operate in the Carrara locality, and it is commonplace for illegal mining to take place in areas designated as National Park land due to the profitability of the stone. Marble of a lesser quality is also pulverised and sold as a textural agent in a variety of beauty products, such as toothpaste and face creams. Global demand for the stone has ensured that miners are increasingly drilling into the Apuan Alps in a bid to hollow them out from the inside.

Fig. 1. Monument to Alberto Meschi in Piazza Gramsci, realized by sculptor Ezio Nelli, 1965, with an inscription which reads: Nobody shall forget that this troubled marble is named after freedom, kinship and faith of Alberto Meschi, anarchist and syndicalist, builder of better times, magnificent worker among the workers and the wretched, open hearth to the wounds of men and of society. He conquered the reduction of the working day. In our lands, and for all pure people, the sunshine of his honesty irradiates from here a sun that will never set. The people of Carrara.

In the visual essay which follows, photographs are displayed in linear progression to draw attention to the problems of over-mining in Tuscany. The sequence begins at the summit of the Apuan Alps, before descending into the marble quarries, and culminating finally in the pulverisation of the rock as fragment and dust. It should be noted that the title of the essay, La Vetta e L’Abisso, refers to a line from Goethe’s Faust, which remains, according to the scholar Marshall Berman, the pre-eminent drama on the tragedy of industrial development. In the play, Faust proclaims that the transformative potential of industrialisation is accompanied by feelings of alienation:

And what is portioned out to all mankind,

I shall enjoy deep within myself, contain

Within my spirit summit and abyss,

Pile on my breast their agony and bliss,

And let my own self grow into theirs unfettered,

Till as they are, at last I, too, am shattered

(Goethe, cited in Berman 1995, 40).

Untitled, and dating from 2017–23, the large format photographs that follow have been reproduced with the addition of a gold-selenium tone and are intended to perform the function of a visual synecdoche, which addresses the problems associated with over-production and resource exploitation in capitalist economies. Moreover, the series represents an attempt to allude to the sensuous rift that exists between humans and the biosphere, which Marx refers to with his concept of metabolic interaction (Stoffwechsel) in his first volume of Capital.

As an example of a visual essay, the approach I have taken can be understood as an attempt to undercut contemporary notions of the sublime, which have characterised the documentation of the Carrara marble quarries in recent years, most notably in the work of Edward Burtynsky. There is an ethical need for environmental photographers to adopt an ‘activist’s perspective’.¹ This requires that a photographer becomes an active participant in the experience of encountering industrial pollution and environmental despoliation, not a distant and passive spectator. In contrast to the sublime, taking up an ‘activist’s perspective’ necessitates that a photographer infiltrates a contested territory, observes the ecosystem at close quarters, and records the effects on the environment first-hand. This visual essay can therefore be understood as my attempt to create a theoretically informed approach to praxis, which is commensurate with my ethical beliefs as an environmentalist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Scott, Photography and Environmental Activism, 135–6.