Staccioli Digital Archive

The exhibition, titled Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy | Mauro Staccioli: Consolidare un’eredità artistica, showcases a collection of over thirty objects, encompassing both works of art and archival materials related to the sculptural practice of Italian artist Mauro Staccioli (1937- 2018). These objects, drawn from the artist’s archive, form an integral part of a larger digitization project carried out by the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for the History of Art, particularly its Digital Humanities Lab and its Photographic Collection in collaboration with the Mauro Staccioli Archive.

Together, the materials on display offer fresh insights into both the artist’s creative process and the reception of his work during the 1970s and 1980s. It was during this period that the artist developed his so-called “sculpture-interventions”— large, temporary, site- specific constructions made of cement and iron, designed to stimulate critical reflections on one’s surroundings.

Featuring a diverse range of media, the exhibition reanimates a selection of these largely ephemeral projects. The first part of the exhibition delves deeper into three pivotal junctures in the artist’s career: the 1972 exhibition Sculptures in the City, which was held in the artist’s native town of Volterra, his notable participation in the Venice Biennale of 1978, and his commissioned work for the National Gallery of Modern art in Rome in 1981. The second section of the exhibition offers additional insights into the artist’s practice by presenting an original sculpture along with a selection of small-scale models.

A custom-made application enables users to explore the digitized collection. It leverages semantic data storage technologies, employing a structured data graph, complemented by hidden features designed to facilitate the discovery of new content during browsing. Through these diverse components, the exhibition highlights both Staccioli’s unique impact on postwar sculptural practice and the crucial role archives play in stimulating new research endeavors. In particular, the exhibition underscores the importance of archives in understanding artistic practices rooted in ephemerality like Staccioli’s own “sculpture-interventions.”

Mauro Staccioli was born in Volterra in 1937. He became an art teacher after completing art school in 1954and soon afterwards developed his own artistic practice. His early artmaking was strongly informed by both his teaching experience and his political militancy for the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In 1972, he developed his so-called »sculpture-interventions« — large temporary sculptures made of cement and iron placed in significant public locations.

Beginning in Volterra, he installed his »sculpture-interventions« throughout the decade in various locations including Parma, Venice, and Rome. During the 1980s, having attainedg reater international recognition, he created works in Germany, France, the United States, and Israel. While his work of the 1980s emphasized dialogues with existing architecture, his work of the 1990s and 2000s looked to the natural environment. Since his death in 2018, Staccioli’s work has been the subject of a retrospective at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

Mauro Staccioli developed his characteristic “sculpture-interventions”—cumbersome constructions made of cement and iron—in the early 1970s as a reaction to what he perceived as a stifling gallery atmosphere. Temporarily installed in significant public locations, they were meant to stimulate critical reflection of one’s surroundings by disrupting everyday circulation patterns. While their formal appearance took up the visual vocabularies of American Minimalism, the works’ short-lived existence and unconventional materials resonated with Post-Minimalist strategies.

Today, our access to Staccioli’s impermanent “sculpture-interventions” of the 1970s and 1980s is mediated by the archive. Beyond providing documentation and clarifying chronology, however, the materials conserved by the artist and his family open onto a broader set of questions that the exhibition Mauro Staccioli: Cementing an Artistic Legacy addresses.

Staccioli executed his first “sculpture-interventions” in his hometown of Volterra in 1972 in an exhibition titled “Sculptures in the City.” There, Staccioli’s works dialogued with meaningful spaces in the city like Piazza dei Priori and the Porta dell’Arco. Mining the archive uncovers the broader stakes of Staccioli’s aesthetics. One finds, for instance, at the bottom of a piece of paper detailing various configurations for promotional materials related to the exhibition, phrases relating to class struggle—a topic of great interest to Staccioli, a militant of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

A few years later in 1978, Staccioli was invited to participate in the Venice Biennale. For this international gathering whose theme investigated the relationship between art and nature, Staccioli produced a large wall that obstructed much of the exhibition’s foot traffic. Sustained engagement with the artist’s plans for the project, rendered in various media ranging from drawing to photocollage, encourages consideration of the wider relations between artistic creativity, materiality, and mediality.

Questions of process are further illuminated in archival holdings related to the “sculpture-intervention” Staccioli positioned at the steps of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in 1981 for the exhibition Arte e Critica. Intrigued by the asymmetrical and slanted surface of the building’s main entry staircase, the artist fashioned his sculpture to rest precariously along the steps. Photographs taken during the construction of the work lay bare the complex mechanics of this endeavor and spotlight the manual labor of artistic creation. Because of conventional assumptions about the singularity of artistic authorship, these collaborative activities often remain underacknowledged following the completion of works of art.

To bring these aspects into clear focus is to approach the archive obliquely rather than frontally. Such a method resonates with what Michel Foucault has called “the archaeology of knowledge” in his groundbreaking 1969 study of the same name that disclosed the discursivity and sited nature of all forms of knowledge. Moreover, the critical operation Foucault proposes aligns with Staccioli’s own ambitions for his “sculpture-interventions.” Like Foucault, Staccioli invites us to pause, take stock of our surroundings, and analyze the sociopolitical forces that structure our existence. By activating the archive, Staccioli’s ephemeral “sculpture-interventions” appear newly reinvigorated and especially resonant for today’s present moment.