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Paper short abstract

The film “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” opens with the destruction of the marble mountains in Italy. For the quarriers and stone carvers of Pietrasanta, human and earth are entangled and embodied, mutually coexisting and disappearing.

Paper long abstract

The cover shot of the film “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch” depicts the destruction of the marble mountains above Carrara and Pietrasanta, Italy. It’s a searing, dramatic, aerial image of hatchback roads cutting up the huge mountain range. It’s an image of destruction, wrought by centuries of human extraction. I explore the multiple intersecting narratives of embodied knowledge, political events, and natural history told by quarriers and artisan stone carvers over a period of centuries.

For the quarriers and stone carvers who work there, and who I have studied for the past 40 years, the story, told over several centuries, from the earliest stories of conquering the mountain and risking lives, to contemporary efforts to protect the mountains, is more complex; the quarriers and carvers celebrate and revere marble as a living material, just as they extract it. Human and earth coexist and constitute embodied, and disappearing, knowledge.

Carving stone, even with the aid of pneumatic tools, is a hand-based, embodied, practice. The human practice of carving and the marble, extracted from the mountain, coexist and constitute embodied, and disappearing, knowledge. The narrative entanglements of marble and artisan converge and compete; they celebrate marble as a living material; they revere the mountain, as dangerous and glorious; and they acknowledge and lament the contemporary disappearance of both the mountain and artisan knowledge.