With the images of a quite controversial 6th Berlin Biennial still impressed in the mind, it is interesting to travel to a small town in the north of Tuscany to visit a Biennial that is, or at least was, unknown to the most of art professionals. This is not the nth new and young biennial emerging in the middle of nowhere - as it would be easy to imagine - but the Biennale Internazionale di Scultura di Carrara was founded in the year 1957, when the number of international exhibitions was very limited and Skulptur Munster (1977) was not even an idea. Anyway its longevity did not guarantee an international recognition and remained a local artistic event until this year 14th edition.

Carrara is the historical city of marble, where, from Romans to Michelangelo, sculptors went to choose and excavate the white stone to export it all over the world; a deeply rooted artistic tradition and driving economy that influenced the history of the Biennale and confined its outcomes within the dichotomy sculpture -marble with no real space for alternative artistic researches. This premise describes the situation inherited by the curator Fabio Cavallucci, who had to face Carrara's history and economy to reinvent a Biennial in its format, its objectives and moreover in its relationship with the citizens and the local politicians, in eight months.
Beyond the selection of mainstream international artists invited to participate (among the others: Maurizio Cattelan, Paul McCarthy, Gillian Wearing, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gustav Metzger and Monica Bonvicini) what needs to be highlighted in the curatorial strategy it is the choice of the exhibition theme: Post-Monument. An issue that symbolically associates the transnational crisis of monuments as institution with the crisis of the stone-related local economy. The decision to reopen historical and ruined industrial buildings, closed since many years and unknown to the most local people, produces further suggestions since they become themselves memorials to this period of transformation. Although neither the theme - monuments have been largely discussed in the last years, especially in Europe and USA - nor the industrial venues are an original choice compared with the international scenario, the combination of the two appears as extremely meaningful in Carrara since it ties the global format of the Biennial to the local context specificity.

EFFORT

The prefix ‘Post-', declared in the title, proposes therefore not only a reflection on ‘the state of art' of monuments and their political and ideological consequences, but demands an effort to imagine new possibilities. Not an easy job for the invited artists who - not always - have been able to respond properly to such a challenge.
Besides an historical selection of monuments produced between the late XIX and the XX Century, arranged in the space laying on pallet or emerging from wooden crates, the presence of the work by Yerbossyn Meldibekov and Nurbossyn Oris is quite significant. ‘Family Album' confronts old private pictures, representing groups or individuals in front of emblematic national monuments, with new pictures that portray the same people in the same site many years later - the documentation makes evident the change of meaning of certain symbols, their transitoriness and, in some cases, the disappearance of the ideologies they represent.
If Barthes stated that "...by making the (mortal) Photograph in the general and somehow natural witness of "what has been," modern society has renounced the Monument..."1 the work by Gustav Metzger brings this process a step further and deprives the photographic medium of its documentative function. By hiding pictures of past dramatic events with ruins and linen clothes, Metzger seems to suggest that historical memory doesn't have to lay on passive memorials but demands a constant act of researching and unveiling to be preserved. The information is hidden also in the work by Rossella Biscotti who collects anarchic-socialist sentences and present them as printing plates and therefore difficult to be deciphered because upside down; a strategy that appears as a gesture against the nowadays easy access to information that produces a short-term memory effect.
The very strong anarchic political tradition of Carrara it is also at the centre of the works by Nemanja Cvijanovic and Deimantas Narkevicius, who both uses sound to celebrate it. The first one lets the visitor be responsible of playing, with a small carillon, the Communist International hymn that is than amplified through the rooms of the building; however the sound and the rhythm changes according with the sensibility of the visitor who activates the work, resulting in multiple and distorted interpretations. Narkevicius produces instead a very intimate space where the voice of an old member of the anarchist movement sings a XIX Century song composed by a young man jailed for his political ideals.

FAÇADE

Through the different conceptual approaches monuments have been deconstructed and rebuild to critically stress both memory and celebration as their two main characteristics and functions. This is the case of the work by Kevin van Braak who build a massive rationalist façade that acts as theatre backdrop. On the front, a XIV, written as Roman style number, indicates the edition of the Biennale and welcomes the visitors with its fascist grandeur but clashes with the decadence of the industrial venue behind it. A totally different approach to the monumentality of architecture for Cyprien Gaillard, who buries in a glass reliquary, the last fragment of Carrara's marble that once covered the lobby of the World Trade Centre.
Artur Zmijewski produced two video portrays of two local artisans employed for the marble industry. By recording their working and private life for 24 hours Zmijewski unveils the invisible routine behind the local dominant economy and honoured it through a reality-show-like format. The labour it is also at the centre of the work by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, who, in the past month, has been working in a marble quarry to tear down a big marble piece by himself using just the oldest excavation technique (hammer and wedges). The exhausting performative action is an attempt to inhabit the working conditions of the quarrymen but remains a non-documented private experience. The extracted block is presented in a small unadorned church and acts as memorial ‘for all the dead workers' - as announced by the words impressed in the apse.
The Biennale ‘Post-Monument' inevitably produced a wide number of new monuments, making clear that this ‘post-' it is still in the making. Re-imagining ways of dealing with collective memory is an ongoing exercise. As Cattelan made clear, with its sort of ‘failed artwork', monuments need to be replaced to be kept alive; if not they are condemned to be forgotten or to perish slowly as Daniel Knorr stages with an oversize incense stick that will burn during the whole duration of the Biennale.
Anyway, it is important to say why and how ‘Post-Monument' and Fabio Cavallucci's artistic direction has been important; for the first time in Carrara (the author of this article was born in the city), art and its institutions are used as critical tool to engage with the city. The biennial, as rarely happens, has been able to uncover and make visible the reality in all its aspects instead of being a mere marketing instrument to celebrate the local potential represented by the marble.

Emanuele GUIDI
is a freelance curator based in Berlin

(1) Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard . New York,1981.