Pacciamatura (Mulching)

note by Matteo Lucchetti on a drawing by Marzia Migliora

Originally commissioned by Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters—the contemporary art programme of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii—to artist Marzia Migliora and curator Matteo Lucchetti, Coltre (Mulch) takes as its point of departure Pliny the Younger’s celebrated letter to Tacitus describing the eruption of AD 79, in which the cloud released by Vesuvius is compared to a towering pine tree whose branches spread out across the sky. Migliora imagines landscapes in which smoke and lapilli emerge from the crater of Vesuvius in the form of stone pines, their needles settling beneath the trees like mulch—the agricultural practice whereby leaves and other decomposing plant matter form a protective layer that nourishes roots. In each drawing of the series, including the one presented here, archaeological fragments are interwoven with new vegetal and organic forms that evoke the possibility of regeneration. Through this gesture, archaeological heritage is transformed into a kind of fertilising matter, enabling Pompeii’s many materials and forms of knowledge—long held in a state of pacciamatura (mulching)—to germinate into new forms of life and new ways of knowing.

Coltre (Mulch)

project by Marzia Migliora
text by Matteo Lucchetti

“The cloud rose, and we could not know for certain from which mountain it came, since we were looking from afar; only later did we learn that it was Vesuvius. Its shape resembled that of a pine tree more than any other kind of tree. Like a huge trunk, the cloud rose high into the sky and expanded, almost forming branches. I believe this happened because, at first, a powerful and uninterrupted gust of air drove it upwards; then, as the force diminished, it left the cloud to itself, or perhaps because its own weight overcame it, the cloud spread out into a vast umbrella: at times it shone with an immaculate whiteness, at others it appeared dark, marked by patches of colour according to the predominance of ash or earth that it had carried upwards with it.”
— From Pliny the Younger’s first letter to Tacitus

The project Coltre (Mulch) by Marzia Migliora—conceived in 2022 within the framework of the programme Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters—takes as its point of departure Pliny the Younger’s celebrated letter to Tacitus, in which the eruption of AD 79 is described and the cloud released by Vesuvius is compared to the shape of a stone pine with an enormous trunk, whose branches multiplied across the sky. This vegetal form restores an organic dimension, connected to the realm of the natural, to the human tragedy experienced by the Roman city, while also creating an image of extraordinary evocative power that continues to persist in the collective imagination. The eruption of the volcano is, in fact, commonly understood as an event that destroyed the city, leaving behind an uninhabited desert, similarly to the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when cities were suddenly deprived of human presence.
Starting from these associations, Coltre (Mulch) envisioned the creation of a collective artwork: a tapestry composed of approximately 15,000 bundles of pine needles intertwined with wool, produced through the participation of Pompeii’s inhabitants in a series of workshops involving different social groups: students, elderly people, children, residents of care homes and others. These bundles symbolise a collective ritualisation, in which gestures such as the simple movement of the hand and the shared experience of making together evoke the ritual of embroidery and ancient craft techniques, whose products can still be found today among Pompeii’s archaeological deposits. The artist compares this gesture to “counting a rosary”, asking participants to “focus their thoughts on a single action: wrapping the wool around the bundle of pine needles”, as if absorbed in a “secular prayer”. During the workshops, the intertwining of wool threads would have unfolded alongside the exchange of stories about the archaeological park and its relationship with the contemporary city.
Coltre (Mulch) thus presents itself as a new ritual for the contemporary town of Pompeii, in which the collective creation of an artwork can be compared to the elaboration of a shared mourning or collective wound. The tapestry, the final outcome of the ritual, like a palio (from the Latin pallium, meaning mantle or cloak), gathers within a collectively constructed image a testimony that brings forth a common and transgenerational identity of the Pompeii territory. Looking at woven objects discovered through archaeological excavations, such as wicker baskets used for food storage, the artist imagined a ritual for the future, in which the symbolic interweaving of stories and the material intertwining of vegetal elements (such as the pine tree that Pliny describes branching out across the sky during the eruption) could become the foundation of a major collective manifestation, with the hope that, in 2022, it might also mark the waning of the pandemic that was still ongoing at the time.
Coltre (Mulch) is a participatory project with a strong public vocation, which, in keeping with the Italian tradition of ritual processes, contains within itself both the time of commemoration and the propitiatory dimension of imagining better times collectively. It involves those who inhabit Pompeii today in a long-term project whose continuation could extend into the future.
The workshops would have taken place either in a single location or across different venues, conceived as spaces of encounter between the various groups invited to participate in the project. The aim of each workshop was to create, through the repetitive gesture of tying (each bundle of pine needles would be covered with wool and secured with a knot), a portion of the 15,000 bundles required to complete the tapestry. The workshops aimed to establish a genuine connection with the local community of Pompeii, involving associations of different kinds and intergenerational groups: from children and teenagers to university students, elderly people, and members of amateur associations from diverse fields, including sports, music and culture. Through a simple process accessible to all, participants would gather in a circle with the materials needed for the manual activity, and each meeting would begin with a story introduced by a guest. The participants would then continue the narrative freely, passing the story from one person to another as it unfolded.
These stories would eventually have been recorded and included in a book illustrated with drawings by the artist.

Archaeologies, Communities, Natures

Interview with Marzia Migliora

Giorgio Motisi: Your research often engages with biological processes, slow transformations, states of latency and regeneration. What happens, from your perspective, when this attention is focused on an “archaeological nature” such as that of Pompeii, where the living dimension appears in an interrupted, fossilised form, yet remains capable of activating processes of imagination and knowledge?

Marzia Migliora: Engaging with an “archaeological nature” such as that of Pompeii shifts my attention towards life as a trace, rather than as a presence. What is interrupted is not motionless: it is a compressed time that continues to generate knowledge. In my work, I have often explored this threshold between the living and the residual, for instance in the video Forever Overhead (Per sempre lassù), 2010, inspired by the fresco of the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum (c. 480 BC), painted on the inner covering slab of the tomb to accompany the deceased on their journey into the afterlife. The title refers to the idea of the dive as a threshold towards another condition, like the death represented in the Magna Graecian tomb, while also quoting David Foster Wallace’s short story of the same title—published in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2000)—which focuses on the experience of diving as an initiatory passage for an adolescent.

GM: Pompeii seems to challenge many of the oppositions through which we are accustomed to interpreting the relationship between nature and culture: here, an extraordinary natural event—the eruption of AD 79—coincided with an unprecedented historical rupture, while at the same time nature continued to inhabit this territory for centuries, following its own temporalities, often indifferent to human events. How does this intertwining between the cyclical time of nature and the linear time of history inform your work?

MM: This intertwining between the cyclical time of nature and the linear time of history deeply permeates my research. In the work Paradossi dell’Abbondanza #61 (La Rivoluzione del Tempo Profondo), 2024, a large-scale drawing, I sought to convey the complex legacy of a portion of mountainous landscape in north-eastern Italy, observing it as the result of processes of transformation and stratification unfolding across temporal scales far beyond the human. I am interested in thinking of landscape not as a backdrop to history, but as an active subject and participant, traversed by temporalities that connect matter, bodies and memory. Pompeii makes precisely this coexistence of different times visible: the time of the historical event and the time of the slow transformations of nature, a condition that I feel particularly close to my own practice.

GM: In your encounter with the organic remains preserved at the Archaeological Park’s Applied Research Laboratory, archaeological matter emerges as the result of a form of survival that exceeds the simple notion of preservation. More broadly, in your research, Pompeii appears as a field of inquiry where different temporal stratifications—human, natural and geological—continue to interact. What difference did you perceive while working on these materials in relation to other contexts in which nature has been an object of observation or investigation for you? What kind of knowledge can emerge, in your view, when the gaze of a contemporary artist engages with a context such as Pompeii, where research has traditionally been based on very different tools and methodologies?

MM: In my encounter with the organic remains preserved at the Applied Research Laboratory of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, I was not confronted with natural processes in progress, but with suspended forms of life that survived a catastrophic event and reached us through almost two thousand years of historical, geological and biological stratifications. My visit to the Laboratory was decisive. I was deeply struck by the encounter with different types of carbonised seeds, and I allowed that experience to sediment for years before deciding to work with it. For the exhibition Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures at KunstHausWien in Vienna, as part of Klima Biennale Wien, I created three new works by drawing on large-format archival photographs of seeds from the Applied Research Laboratory of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Buried beneath the ash of the volcanic eruption of Pompeii in AD 79 for almost two thousand years, the seeds pictorially germinate—drawing inspiration from their so-called “dormancy”, a phase of physiological rest in which a seed awaits the conditions necessary for germination. I believe that the contribution of the artistic gaze, in a context such as Pompeii, lies in accompanying scientific knowledge without replacing it, opening up new forms of thought and new questions about the relationship between life, memory and transformation.

GM: Pliny the Younger’s account of the cloud rising from the summit of Vesuvius and assuming the shape of a great pine introduces an explicitly arboreal and vegetal form into the narrative of catastrophe. Does this analogy interest you primarily as an iconographic element, or rather as a conceptual threshold capable of suggesting a different way of understanding the eruption—not only as a destructive event, but as a process that reinscribes humanity within a broader cyclical and transformative logic?

MM: The image described by Pliny the Younger, of the cloud rising from the mouth of the volcano and taking on a form resembling the crown of a pine tree, interests me above all as a conceptual threshold rather than as an iconographic element. The arboreal form of the pine introduces an unexpected continuity between what we perceive as natural and what we define as catastrophic, opening up the possibility of reading the eruption not only as a destructive event, but as a process that reshapes the relationships between human beings and the environment within a broader, transformative logic. In this sense, the image becomes a tool for thinking about time not in linear terms, but as a continuous stratification and recomposition of forms and matter. This is a perspective I explored in the unpublished project Coltre (Mulch), where Pliny’s cloud-pine becomes a collective device: an intertwining of gestures and vegetal materials that activates an idea of transformation and shared memory as an ongoing process, rather than merely as a trace of the past. Through this lens, catastrophe is never only an ending, but also a reorganisation of meanings and possibilities.

GM: With the project Coltre (Mulch), your research indeed opens up to an explicitly collective dimension, entrusting the repeated gesture of weaving pine needles with a function that is simultaneously ritual, relational and generative. How do you imagine that a participatory work of this kind could activate, in the present, a new relationship between the archaeological context and contemporary forms of sociality, transforming and sharing individual memories into a form of dialogue?

MM: With the project Coltre (Mulch), conceived in 2021 for Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Matters, curated by Matteo Lucchetti and Andrea Viliani, and which has so far remained at a project stage, I was interested in activating a collective gesture capable of connecting archaeological heritage with the community that lives alongside it today. Starting from Pliny the Younger’s image of the “cloud-pine”, I imagined the collective creation of a large tapestry composed of thousands of bundles of stone pine needles wrapped in wool thread, produced through workshops open to different generations of Pompeii inhabitants. More than the final artwork itself, I was interested in the process: shared time, the repetition of gestures, and the exchange of stories and experiences. I believe that a context such as Pompeii can generate new forms of sociality when it ceases to be perceived only as a testimony of the past and becomes a space-time of relationships in the present. In this sense, memory is not something to be passively preserved, but a collective practice that can be continuously reactivated and transformed through dialogue between people, places and (re)generations

Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures

KunstHausWien, Klima Biennale Wien, Vienna

Marzia Migliora’s works are conceived as reflections on how life develops, changes and acquires meaning, even when such meaning appears to be absent. For the exhibition Seeds. Reclaiming Roots, Sowing Futures, curated by Sophie Haslinger at KunstHausWien, Vienna, as part of Klima Biennale Wien, the artist created three new works by drawing on large-format photographic reproductions of seeds from the “Annamaria Ciarallo” Applied Research Laboratory of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii. Their titles suggest a leap through time—from the volcanic eruption of Pompeii in AD 79 towards a life of tomorrow, perhaps even beyond our own, embodied by the petrified seeds of walnuts, broad beans and cereals.

Buried beneath the ash for almost two thousand years, these seeds were discovered during archaeological excavations in Pompeii. The photographic enlargement gives them a sculptural appearance. Yet it is not only the change of scale that unsettles the aesthetics of scientific representation: the seeds pictorially germinate (Germinazione), inspired by the so-called dormancy—the intrinsic capacity of seeds to germinate only after a period of physiological rest, allowing them to take advantage of optimal growing conditions. This imagined dormancy becomes a metaphor for possible processes of ecological transformation: what remains latent? What can continue to thrive?