Eleonora Roaro: LA NUBE
In this seminar, I present the audio-video project LA NUBE (THE CLOUD), an audio-video project developed for my solo show at mudaC | museo delle arti Carrara, held from 11 October 2025 to 25 January 2026.
The project investigates the environmental consequences of the Zona Industriale Apuana (Apuan Industrial Zone, or Z.I.A.), located between Massa and Carrara, with particular attention to the explosion of Farmoplant (formerly Montedison-Diag) on 17 July 1988, the final event in a series of incidents which led to the dismantling of the chemical complex.
Conceived as both an audio-video installation and a music album, LA NUBE is divided into 12 parts, corresponding to industrial-inspired tracks composed by the musician Emiliano Bagnato, which combine instrumental parts, synthesizers, field recordings, and songs. It retraces the key phases in the history of the Zona Industriale Apuana from the Fascist era until today. The result is a reflection on the environmental and social impact of the economic boom, and on the post-truth narratives constructed by the media and industries for political and economic interests.
The protagonist of the video is the ZIA (in Italian, a pun between ZIA/AUNT and the acronym of Apuan Industrial Zone), a woman from Alteta (a district of Massa situated within the industrial zone), who is a personification of the Apuan Industrial Zone and its contradictions. The illustrations and animations created by Corinne Ingegnieri and inspired by DIY punk graphics function as a frame narrative, marking the passing of time through the changes in the ZIA’s house and the transformations in the landscape seen from her window. They also serve as a connecting thread between heterogeneous archive materials such as Super8 films, VHS-C, newspaper articles, drawings, photographs, flyers and digital videos.
LA NUBE revisits the countercultural protests and political activism, focusing in particular on citizens’ movements such as the Assemblea Permanente dei Cittadini di Massa e Carrara (Permanent Assembly of the Citizens of Massa and Carrara), Medicina Democratica (Democratic Medicine) and the environmentalist associations active between the 1970s and 1990s, denouncing the impact of the Apuan Industrial Zone on the environment, public health and safety at work, and fought against misinformation.
Karen Squire: Fixity
Will be speaking about a section of her thesis that brings together the correlations between early modern mining in SW England and early modern printing in the Germany/Prague area. This section leads on from her contextualisation of her research and informed what she did in response to the issues that the thinking in this section stirred up for her.
She will introduce the idea that the quality of print that was drawn upon to explain the importance and impact of print technology at this time was the ability to create many copies of the same information that could be disseminated broadly. (Eisenstein, McLuhan, Latour).
Her early research suggested that this quality, which we will hitherto refer to as “fixity”, was not inherent to the technology itself, but rather contingent upon the use of the technology. This led her to think of Fixity as a performative quality of labour practices.
Her research wanted explores if this was a situation unique to printing practices or if it applied also to other labour practices. Her hunch was that how things were done; and the control over that doing; might have an impact socially that has not been recognised alongside previous technological determinist interpretations of printing.
Vagab(o/u)nds Research 