Venetian Glass Excavation
During summers in Italy I was always fascinated by local stories of farmers unearthing golden Roman coins, disembodied parts of sculpted bodies appearing in the middle of fields and of course the famous discovery of an ancient Etruscan tomb — featuring an immaculate chariot (traded for a rooftop) that now sits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘La biga di Monteleone di Spoleto’).
Maybe it sparked a speculative fantasy of mine that I can’t seem to shake off for some years now — imagining an enormous X-ray machine scanning the entirety of the earth’s surface. Like a slow moving satellite, it could discover and differentiate between all the different layers of forgotten objects, treasures & civilisations erased deep in time, underground.
A few months ago, I found myself on an island outside of Venice, charged with WILD energy. In the middle of ice cold woods you could hear the sea, creamy shells spilled from roots, abandoned homes held hostage to thick vines, a discontinued vineyard from the 80s frozen in an ominous dark green bamboo forest …. and then the glass.
A flicker of colour in the wet soil — and Hamutal and I began to curiously dig with our bare hands, discovering one by one, the most glorious pieces of glass ! — ruby spotted with golds, blues like the lagoon, chunks of swirls, black onyx. We could not believe our eyes.
I turned to Tullio, an artist who volunteered at the regenerative farm, saying how it felt like we were archeologists. He responded by saying that was exactly what we were. Underneath the topsoil, we were discovering 13th and 14th century Murano glass, dumped hundreds and hundreds of years ago — revived in 21st hands as precious treasures.
