Carrara, Italy
For the first week in Italy, I stayed in Carrara with Claire McArdle until my Airbnb in Firenze was available. Claire had book an airbnb in Nicola, a medieval town on top of the hill that looks over Carrara. The drive up is an adventure of its own. Cliff side roads with sharp turns makes you wonder how they even built this towering village in that time. There are no roads into village at a point, so you have to park the car then walk the rest of the way. Each of these homes, while all connected, have their own charm and personality to them. The doors a variety of jewel and velvety colors pair beautifully with the stone structures. Some homes are adorned with little figures where pockets of stone have fallen. A place untouched by time until an odd tv antenna or the soft sound from a tv playing brings you back, providing a wonderful retreat from the hustle of Carrara and the studio.
Carrara is a working town with many residents' lives focused on various aspects of the marble industry, from mining to transporting marble blocks and the factories to the studios which employ the Artigiani. The Cooperativa Sculturi di Carrara is a short ride up from the train station, just off a hairpin turn coming into the industrial district. If you blink, you will miss the entrance. Slabs of marble are stacked and placed wherever space is available, along with finished sculptures awaiting transportation to their final home.
Walking into the studio, the Artigiani are busy working away; clouds of marble dust hang in the air, until the dust finds its way back to the earth, similar to snow, covering any available surface. Saws and drills hum as the Artigiani work by hand, chipping away sections of the translucent white marble blocks with a radio playing a mix of English and Italian music. Moving through the studio space, one needs to keep their wits about them. Discarded marble breaks mixed with power tools and plaster models stacked around the various workstations. Sculptures currently being worked on sit upon large crates.…seeming to defy physics.
The energy in the studio is palpable. As an Art History major, I studied about the studios and their role throughout the history of art. The Carrara quarries have provided artistic inspiration and raw materials since their discovery. The town, nestled at the base of the Apuan Alps, has been a gathering place for artists from Michelangelo to modern artists such as Henry Moore and Louise Bourgeois, who employed the Artigiani to rough out their work. The books, while educational, cannot adequately convey the presence and energy of the studio. Watching the Artigiani work with precision, felt poetic as they chipped away the stone by hand, slowly revealing the hidden figure.
When Claire first arrived in Italy in 1988 to work among the Artigiani of Carrara, she found a kinship with the Italian artisans. I have felt a similar connection to these Artigiani who have welcomed me into their space. As I photograph and film the artigiani and Claire McArdle as they work, I learn more about the various nuances of marble and the tools and techniques they use. An education that simply could not have been learned in a classroom or via textbook.
Riccardo, Raffaele, and Diego, the founders of Cooperativa Sculturi di Carrara, who were 17 years old when Claire first met them, are the driving force behind keeping Carrara's most ancient and distinctive tradition alive. The skills and techniques of working marble, passed down verbally from artigiani to student, involve many years of practice. The Artigiani are quickly becoming obsolete as robots have been brought into the studios either to replace them or to increase production. Cooperativa Sculturi is one of the few remaining studios in Carrara and Italy that works by hand in one of two ways; the pointing machine for translations on the same scale, and the compass method, which allows the enlargement or the reduction.
The three compasses method, which Riccardo (pictured above) is using to rough out Claire's sculpture, was invented centuries ago by the Artigiani. It uses several nails or markings positioned at the exact locations on the model and the marble block. Each point marked is geometrically defined. The compass measures the distance between a nail and the point, with each measurement transferred to the marble by an arc of a circle. The point to be reached in the depth of the marble is at the precise point where, by chiseling and roughing the sculpture by hand, the three arcs of a circle meet.
Marble Factory in Carrara, Italy circa 1800s
Cooperativa Sculturi dreams of being able to call Carrara "the little Paris," as it was named in the early 1900s when the artistic aspect of this city dominated everything.
The studio is housed in a former factory (picture circa 1800s) that employed over 20 workers who fabricated marble architectural columns. In the weeks following, I will travel from Firenze to Carrara to document Claire and the Artigani.
The Italian Diaries have had many evolutions in my mind, but now I see it as a documentation of these artisans' stories and my connection to them.