Mauro Staccioli Archives Museum opened in Volterra

An Archive Museum dedicated to Mauro Staccioli (Volterra, 1937 - Milan, 2018): it opened its doors yesterday in his Volterra, in the rooms of the Ex-Oratorio del Crocifisso, within the complex of the Centro Studi Espositivo Santa Maria Maddalena, which was made available by the Fondazione Cassa Risparmio di Volterra, promoter of the initiative. It took four years of work, on the part of the Mauro Stacccioli Archive Association, which collaborated with the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome (through its Digital Humanities Lab and Photo Library), which oversaw the digitization of the artist’s papers (about 9,000 sheets transformed into digital format), to arrive at the opening of the Museum Archive.

The tour allows visitors to see about forty maquettes, among the many made over the years by Staccioli for study, verification and presentation of his sculptures, set within urban places or in natural contexts (some of them in the immediate surroundings of Volterra: they are among his best-known works), in which a stringent architectural projection is combined with a poetic utopian vision. The exhibition of this nucleus of plastic projects is flanked by an interactive touch screen specially designed to trace back, through archival documents, sketches, preparatory drawings, and digitized design photomontages, the large sculptures made by the artist in Italy and abroad. Also located inside the Ex-Oratory is the sculpture Corbano 2009, created for the small country church of Corbano (a ruin dating back to 900 AD, of which the perimeter walls and the apsidal basin remained, supported by two columns with two Roman capitals of perusal from the theater of Volterra that had been used here). Mauro Staccioli’s sculpture, in addition to its artistic value, was intended to emphasize the deteriorating situation of this small but important building, which obviously, without any maintenance, some 15 years after the placement of the sculpture has unfortunately collapsed.

The Ex-Oratory also finds a new home in the Ex-Oratory forMauro Staccioli’s paper archives, consisting of notes, drawings, plans, documents, photographs and catalogs, which, thanks to this new location and the digital database created by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, is intended to offer scholars easier access to the documents and the possibility of further studies on the artist.

“Mauro Staccioli,” writes Maria Laura Gelmini, “works following a peculiar procedure that responds to the founding need of his thought: to read the place in the light of history and to leave an indicative sign in the wake of this reading. A conscious choice is being defined in the artist at the end of the 1960s: politically engaged, he feels art as a dutiful response to being, a work participating in the debate. His sensitivity to the socio-historical environment emerges in Volterra in 1972: the place, the urban space, the building, nature, have their own history, their own breath, bear the imprints of ancient events or socio-environmental situations. A few years later, Staccioli will give his exhibition in Vigevano Castle (1977) the emblematic title of Reading an Environment. The artist ’reads’ the site before placing a sign there, commensurate not only with the space, but with the presence of man. Intense and invisible work precedes Staccioli’s sculpture, a perfect poetic synthesis of rhythm and measure in relation to place. The materials collected in the studio-archive over 40 years of work, in testifying to an intense activity, offer the keys to understanding his ideational path. [...] A complex intellectual path, very close to that of an architect: from the first contact with the place, its history, its traces, fixed in a photographic campaign, noted in notebooks, essential documents for impact considerations and the first forms conceived in situ. At this point the artist’s imagination can soar from a well-defined design ground, as faithful as possible to the historical-environmental reality of the place.”

It was Staccioli himself who wanted to start the archive, of which he was president, in 2012. Today, the leadership of the institute has passed to Giulia Staccioli, the artist’s daughter, while the role of organizational manager is Andrea Alibrandi, who has been alongside Mauro Staccioli in the same position since the foundation of the archive. With the founding of the Archives Museum also comes the addition of the director, who will be the young researcher Caterina Martinelli.

Image: Mauro Staccioli, La Boldria (Volterra, 2009). Photo: Serena Borghesi

Mauro Staccioli Archives Museum opened in Volterra

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