1. Excerpt from:

Marzia Migliora
Coltre (Mulch), 2021
video, 2’36”
Produced by Edithing Art Department
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milan/Naples

2–10. Drawings from the series:

Marzia Migliora
Coltre (Mulch), 2021
mixed technique and collage
each 31 x 24 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milan/Naples

11. Video:

Marzia Migliora
Coltre (Mulch), 2021
video, 2’36”
Produced by Edithing Art Department
Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milan/Naples

In January 2020, just a few months before the global lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I had the good fortune to accompany Marzia Migliora literally into the bowels of the earth, on an exploration of the Realmonte and Racalmuto deep salt mines in Sicily, for the first site inspection that was to lead to the creation of the virtual reality video The Spectre of Malthus. This work addresses the incompatibility between the growth of the world’s population and the increase in food production through the lens of the famous English demographer Thomas Malthus, updating his thinking to the contemporary situation.
The idea was very simple: to take the viewers of the video hundreds of metres below sea level, into the man-made tunnels dug out of the sodium chloride formed millions of years before, in order to reflect together, through a series of animations created by the artist, on human hunger as a millennial driver and extractor of fossil, animal and, alas!, also human resources. The sedimentation of the sea water, trapped by the tectonic movements that led to the emergence of these Sicilian geographical features, still exists in our lives today in the form of pure salt, which enhances the flavours of our dishes and nourishes us with the mineral salts we need for our survival. Ancient eras meet on our tables, making food and its dynamics a very important issue, intertwined as it is with the political, historical and geographical evolution of our species. The project is part of the artist’s decade-long research into the common imagery that governs our relationship with food and, more generally, with the world of agriculture and the dynamics of industrial production that dominate it. Interweaving drawings, collages and installations, in her work Migliora combines the analysis of scenarios of colonialism and exploitation with ideas and practices of sustainability and necessary radicalism. Her collages investigate unexpected kinships between species, to quote the expression used by Donna Haraway, and generate sensitive information against the backdrop of our prejudices that misinform our actions, which are increasingly crucial in the context of the climate crisis.
More than a year later, in response to Pompeii Commitment‘s invitation, we organised another trip, this time to the boundless resources of the Pompeii Archaeological Park’s storerooms, and more specifically to the organic department, where most of the findings related, but not limited, to food are kept. Bread, peaches, pomegranates, ready meals crystallised in their containers, wicker baskets and other textiles revealing the interwoven fibres that have withstood the test of time and are here today to testify to an everyday life that humanises the archaeological site, and brings Pompeii closer to our lives.
Her piece entitled Intrecci (Weavings), consisting of a video and nine drawings entitled Coltre/Mulch, takes as its starting point the iconic letter written by Pliny the Younger to Tacitus, describing the eruption of 79 AD, where the cloud emitted by Vesuvius is compared to the shape of a pine tree with an enormous trunk, whose branches multiplied in the sky. This plant form restores an organic dimension, belonging to the sphere of the natural, to the human tragedy experienced by the Roman city, as well as creating an image with an extremely strong evocative power. The eruption of the volcano as an event that freezes the urban scene, transforming it into an uninhabited desert, where mantles of ash are deposited over everything. A scene that the artist imagines as a scenario in which organic material is allowed to settle, as in a mulch, an agricultural technique in which blankets of leaves or other plant residues form a cover that promotes the re-fertilisation of the soil. In fact, in each drawing, which vaguely seems to illustrate Pliny’s words, fragments of wall paintings, views of the city, plaster casts of a trunk, or a dog, are interwoven with new vegetal, organic forms, extending the life of those findings and connecting them with new future landscapes. In the video, the artist’s conceptual link between the archaeological park and the technique of mulching – typical of sustainable agronomic practices – is made clear by a shower of pine needles, often used for these operations, and here also recalls the metaphor used by Pliny to describe the eruption.
The tectonic movements that shook Pompeii before 79 AD are different from those of Pangaea, linked today to the scarcity of what has – preciously – remained, and not to the abundance of salt deposits, but the material handled by Migliora responds to an almost equal desire to shorten epochal distances in order to interweave narratives and imagery. A gesture aimed at transforming the archaeological heritage into a kind of fertilising agent that allows the diverse knowledge, which has long remained in a state of mulch, to germinate in new forms. ML

Home page image: Marzia Migliora, Coltre (Mulch) (video still), 2021. Courtesy the Artist and Galleria Lia Rumma Milan/Naples