Pompeii Commitment

Linking together history and stories, and working across different disciplines, Lara Favaretto creates a rich interweaving of diverse times and spaces, bringing them together to form a spectrum filled with potential, discovery, and extraordinary tales, while critically redefining the concept and the experience of the work of art, exhibition, and museum. Digging-Up: Atlas of the Blank Histories explores the multiple, potential, and even contradictory interpretations by which it is possible to understand the technique of coring, that is, excavating and extracting materials from subsurface deposits. Shown for the first time in 2012 in Kabul, on the occasion of dOCUMENTA 13, the project was expanded and was shown again in Cappadocia in 2017. For this new chapter of the Digging-Up: Atlas of the Blank Histories, the investigation started out from a series of stories set in Pompeii, both inside and outside the archaeological area, reaching all the way to Vesuvius, in areas such as Castellammare di Stabia, Herculaneum, and Torre del Greco, and as far as Pozzuoli. The uniqueness of this land is recounted in stories and documents, and in legends handed down by the locals, pointing the way to the places where the core samples were taken. These range from the discovery in 1936 of an enigmatic magical square on a column in the Large Palaestra in ancient Pompeii, to Lake Avernus, where Virgil places the entrance to Aeneas’ world of the hereafter, and which is bound up by spell of the Fata Morgana, all the way to the unauthorised buildings and the concealment of the archaeological site in Pollena Trocchia, and on as far as the Vesuvius Observatory. There are events of all kinds, with stories omitted, sometimes concealed, deposited in the subsoil, only to be brought back to the surface by means of coring.
Once extracted, each individual core will be investigated by geologists who will examine the materials it is made of and thus identify the various periods in time: a horizontal reading that transforms the core into a sort of timeline – a spatial materialisation of the passing of time.
This scientific analysis gives concrete form to the possibility of recreating, at some point in the future, the chemical composition of the ground in a particular geographical area and at a particular time, with traces of the stories it has been through contained in its DNA. Each core sample is shown in a standard conservation box and is later archived together with all the others in an iron container that is sealed and buried underground as a time capsule. It is buried in a particular place on Vesuvius, and marked with a local lava stone bearing the date of the burial and disinterment – the latter being planned for a century later – and the geographic coordinates will be sent to the International Time Capsule Society (ITCS) in Atlanta. A plaque with the extraction data is set up at each point where a core sample has been taken, creating an open-air museum of the local area, starting from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii all the way to the slopes of Vesuvius. The core samples were taken in the Archaeological Park of Pompeii from the Large Palaestra, the Tower of Mercury, the Villa of Diomedes, and the Triangular Forum. In external areas administered by the Archaeological Park, digs were carried out at the suburban sanctuary in the Fondo Iozzino (Pompeii), Villa Sora (Torre del Greco), and Villa San Marco (Castellammare di Stabia). In the area administered by the City of Pompeii, in Messigno and close to the chapel of Santa Giuliana. Further operations were carried out at the archaeological park of Herculaneum and at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in the National Park of Vesuvius.

Lara Favaretto (1973, Treviso)

The material documenting the entire process of implementing the project is available via the Commitment by Lara Favaretto, with a text by Andrea Viliani.