Living by Vesuvius.

Volcanoes are not only symbols of death and destruction, but also of survival and human persistence. The ever-present threat of future eruptions, as well as the memories of those past, forces those living in its presence to confront and respect the unbridled power of nature. When we consider a volcanos potential for destruction as well as regeneration, and take into account the cyclical nature of its activity, we see in it an allegory for the processes of history, which sees civilisations destroyed and rebuilt. When it erupts, a volcano brings tragedy and trauma to those who witness it, but when the eruption ends, people carry on living in the same destructed areas, as they attempt to reconstruct their lives after the trauma. As survivors of such a profound tragedy, their lives cannot help but take on a mythological dimension, yet their desire is to return to normality. When we consider the great body of art and literature it has inspired, then we must concede that Vesuvius is probably in this sense the most mythical of European volcanoes. Every description or painting of the eruption has contributed in a way to the construction of this narrative, introducing into the collective imagery of mankind. ----Whenever Vesuvius erupts, its lava flow erases the surrounding cities, writing a new chapter in the ever accumulating mythology of the volcano, and creating fresh narratives in a land once believed to have been favoured by the gods. Even the gods would not have permitted such a destruction1, commented the Latin poet Martialis. Meanwhile the volcano has gone on to claim more and more victims throughout the centuries, with the height of its activity between 1631 and 1944. The volcanos popularity amongst romantic and historical painters has also served to make it a potent and recognisable subject in art. In the eighteenth century, representations of the eruptions became less focused on the natural beauty of the volcano, and became increasingly sensitive and sympathetic to

M. Valerii Martialis, Epigrammi, Zanichelli , Milano1950, pag. 56

its power as a destructive force of nature. Examples of such can be seen in the paintings of the Norwegian Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857).

The myth of Vesuvius thus rests not only upon the foreboding sense of fear and death which surround it, but also upon the sublime visions of fire, and its powers of transformation and regeneration. Its popularity with the young intellectuals of the Grand Tour, who came in droves to marvel at it, served to further consolidate and spread this myth, as they set about making careful studies and writing vibrant accounts of the volcano and its the surrounding landscape.

Behold me now at the top of Vesuvius, seated at the mouth of the volcano, writing, and preparing for my descent into the crater. The sun appears from time to time through the mass of vapour, which envelops the whole mountain. This fog, which hides from me one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world, serves to re-double the horrors of the place. Vesuvius, separated by clouds from the enchanted country at its base, has the appearance of being situated in the deepest desert; and the terror it inspires is in no degree diminished by the sight of a flourishing city at its foot.2

Romanticised narratives such as these, limited in the sense they do not take into account the personal experiences of those living in the shadow of the volcano, have nevertheless ensured that Vesuvius has entered into the collective consciousness as a potent and recognisable image of impending danger. However, the one million people who live in the 7 Km area known as the Red Zone have to deal with this perennial emblem of destruction on a daily basis. These people have chosen to still live with this area, and as such they can do little else but hope that no major eruption will occur during their lifetimes.

In the spring of 1944, at the time of the last eruption which coincided with the bombing of the region by the US army, an officer of the American Army based in Naples, describes this apparent contradiction:
2

Franois de Chateaubriand, Travels in America and Italy, Applewood Books, Bedford MA firstly published in 1828, (Volume 2), pag. 237

At this point I was right under the great grey cloud, full of swellings and protuberances, like some colossal pulsating brain. Reaching San Sebastiano, it seemed incredible that all this people could have consented to go on living in such a position. The town was built at the very tip of a tongue of land until now spared by the volcano, but completely outflanked by the tremendous lava fields left by the eruption in 1872, and in effect lying in the valley between them. () Here, stranded as it was in the no-mans-land of the volcano, any outsider would have predicted the towns eventual destruction as a matter of mathematical certainty, yet apparently no citizens of San Sebastiano would admit even to the possibility of this. Civic permanency is a matter of religious faith. Buildings are solidly constructed to withstand the centuries. Slow growing trees are planted.(), all windows face westwards in hope across green valleys towards Naples, and the houses turn their back on the grey eternal cone of the volcano.3

And yet, paradoxically, despite Vesuvius infamy as a symbol of tyranny and ever looming destruction, for the locals of this region it is equally a symbol of fertility and prosperity. This is owing to the fact that the very same lava which destroys the crops during an eruption, also nourishes the earth with minerals which greatly increase the productivity of the land for future generations. It is for this reason that in Roman times the area was known as Campania Felix. This duality of role in terms of the volcanos powers of destruction and regeneration is also evident, albeit in a different sense, in the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii. The scale of the eruption saw the city buried beneath six metres of petrified ash, which served to preserve it for seventeen centuries. It was witnessed by Pliny the younger who made the following account.

Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches.4
3 4

Norman Lewis, Naples 44, Eland , London 1978, pag.106 Pliny The Younger, Letter to Cornelius Tacitus AD 79, available in World History, Thomson Wadsworth, Belmont 2007, pag.148

The city has now become a time capsule where the fleeing victims of the eruption can be viewed in the tragic energy of the moment of the destruction. Indeed everything in Pompeii brings us back to that moment: the slogans of the political campaign on the walls, the house furnishings, the little shops, all seem still alive, frozen in time.

However its fame has now transcended this event of loss and has made Pompeii one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world. The current inhabitants have grown up amongst the history of their town and its past to the point that they have accepted the fate that could consume them as well.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Naples written in 1924 comments on the extent to which Pomeii inhabitants have been able transform this traumatic event into something profitable. Everything that the foreigner desires, admires, and pays for is Pompeii. Pompeii makes the plaster imitation of the temple ruins, the lava necklace, and the louse- ridden person of the guide irresistible. This fetish is all the more miraculous as only a small minority of those whom is sustains have ever seen it.5

For those living beneath the volcano, the struggle of the everyday prevails. There is no room for melancholy, or a tragic view of the past as the people have come to depend on the aftermath of the eruption as the source of their economic stability and prosperity. In Pompeii, this operation of putting on stage the tragedy of destruction, this turning of tragedy into kitsch, has for Benjamin something miraculous because it reflects how the ability of the people to reconstruct and reinterpret their past has had a beneficial impact on the present and the future. The fact that, despite the intact state of conservation of the Pompeii ruins, this myth is spoiled by the long cue of busses assaying the small town, the street vendors selling reproductions, the mass of tourists,

Walter Benjamin, Naples in One-Way Street, Verso, London 1997 pag.169. First published in Franfhurther Alleimaghe in 1924.

becomes completely acceptable because this is the way the people have chosen to deal with the remnants of the past in the present. This ability to detach from the traumas of the past may help to explain why the people continue to live in this area and build new houses despite the fact that they could potentially at any time be destroyed by the volcano. The population which lives in the shadow of Vesuvius replaced the fear with indifference6, explains the Mayor of the aforementioned town of San Sebastiano. However it is necessary to deal with and confront the past on a practical level. The necessity of designing and developing new strategies and methods of evacuation, forces the inhabitants to learn from and consult the past as a means of preparing for the future. ------------------The project Volcano 2000, presented to the EU in 1995 but never approved, proposed to develop and implement guidelines and strategies aimed as reducing the volcanic risk in the Vesuvius area. The project advocated a holistic, interdisciplinary approach and involved engineers, geophysicists, seismologists, physicists, computer scientists, historians, urban planners, sociologists, educators, telecommunication experts, economists, environmentalists, civil protection volunteers, as well as the general population. In particular they proposed to Analyse the behaviour of the population during past volcanic events, both during and after these events, in order to contribute towards the development of a sociological model aimed at the most probable behaviour of the population during future eruptions of the volcano7.

Excerpts from the letter of Mayor G. Capasso of October 2, 1995 addressed to Prime Minister and other local and national officials responsible for civil protection. 7 Flavio Dobran, VESUVIUS 2000 - Prevention of Catastrophe in the Vesuvius Area, GVES Napoli 1998, pag.11

The aims of the Volcano Project are in direct contrast to the approaches advocated by the The Ministry of Civil Protection, who rather than utilizing the past as a valuable tool to prepare for and understand the present, opt instead for a more short-term and pragmatic approach to dealing with potential eruptions. In collaboration with the Vesuvius Observatory, The Ministry have organised and carried out several evacuation tests in the area and have contributed greatly to the so called culture of emergency 8. In regards to this, the mayor of San Sebastiano wrote. A civil protection plan requires to consider the psychosis of masses. () The problem is therefore not to propose an evacuation plan, which should only be the last item in a chain, but to explain to the population how to cohabit with the volcano in the absence of a territorial plan which indicates to the future generations where to construct. It is necessary to promote a new culture, starting from the schools, that allows for the formation of an "autoconscience9.

In this multifaceted scenario with a population torn between evacuation exercises and campaigns for auto-conscience, a film by Italian artist Rosa Barba, shows how individuals cope with the ghost of the Vesuvius eruptions. Set mainly in the old observatory near the volcano crater, The Empirical Effect10, is a commentary on the profound impression that the eruption of 1944 evoked in the memory of those who witnessed it. The film is an exploration of the attempts of the survivors to exorcise and come to terms with these traumas.

The Empirical Effect charts the stories of a society whose lives are infused with an incredible tension, yet are paralyzed and docile tells the artist, At the foot of the sleeping monster, the mafia runs its empire, filtering untold numbers of illegal Chinese migrants into a secretive parallel society. They remain visible only in their
8 9

Idem. Excerpts from the letter of Mayor G. Capasso of October 2, 1995 addressed to Prime Minister and other local and national officials responsible for civil protection. 10 The Empirical Effect, fiction, 27min, 16mm transfered to blueray, 2009

social impact; meanwhile all official attention is focused on the volcano, where nature is dramatized as a media spectacle a powerful structure beyond comprehension. It is perhaps similar in this sense to the ways in which the obscure social situation at its foot is mystically narrated11. Produced in collaboration with the scientific research laboratory Vesuvius Observatory the film draws on different sources, including archival material, footage of a real evacuation simulation and images takes from CCTV cameras. The way in which all these diverse sources are intertwined ensures that the viewer understands immediately that they are not watching a documentary in the traditional sense, but rather a poetical and lyrical commentary on the peculiar social conditions which exist in this area. Shifting between documentary and fiction the film finds itself in the indefinite threshold between historical reconstruction and the narrative of the myth. The artists reveals the precarious and instable situation which the victims of an eruption find themselves because of the traumas involved. I was interested in those who had survived the outbreak in 44. (..) I invited them to shoot with me a film using the old osservatorio as a stage for projecting memories but also staging with all those apparatus that we use to "protect" them in the last few years: seismographs, the sensitivity of animals etc.12 The survivors thus become the protagonists in an absurd, and on the surface inane drama set in the very place which was once used to monitor the volcanos eruptions. The film combines the everyday with the bizarre, propounding the belief that people who undergo traumatic experiences, often approach their daily activities in a compulsive manner. Thus at one moment we view them scribbling and making notes on a geographical floor map of Italy, while in the next moment we see the same floor mopped clean. The futility of such daily rituals serves to further emphasis the predicament in which the protagonists find themselves.

11 12

Form an email conversation with the artist, February 2011 Idem

This main narrative is counter balanced with shots taken during a test evacuation in the Summer of 2009 in which the artist herself took part. In these scenes we see the inhabitants of the Red Zone running for safety during the largest simulation ever staged. These scenes evoke in the viewer a sense that they are witnessing some sort of strange modern ritual, with the hypnotic sounds of the sirens reminiscent of the beating of drums. In overlapping these two realities, the one of the survivors and the one of those who live in constant danger, the living city and the otherwise abandoned old observatory, the film brings present and past into the same time suspension. Here collective memories and traumas are constantly recalled and wiped away, and transformed into a myth where the past is continually relived. The multiplicity of the filmic material creates a sort of polyphonic choir were each voice playing a precise symbolic and meaningful part. The archive images of Naples at the time of the 1944 eruption, the ones of the evacuation tests of 2009, shots of the survivors in the old observatory, although lacking in any discernable chronological narrative, nevertheless all work together to produce a soft of visual symphony. The soundtrack of the film, composed by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma, enhances the rhythm of this sort of cyclical symphony. The repetitive and rhythmic aspect of the sound and the visuals in the film also evokes the cyclical way in which memory works. Indeed even the title, The Empirical Effect, is a term associated with exploring the way in which memory works, in particular the effects which beta audio signals have on facilitating simple free recall and routine motor memory skills. In their attempts to exorcise their traumatic experiences, the survivors of the tragedy are forced to confront painful memories at they spend time in the place once used to monitor eruptions. Yet instead of sharing their stories with the artist and with the viewers, they engage rather in a series of repetitive and compulsive tasks such as continually mopping the floor or idly fidgeting with the equipment in the observatory. At times they look outside the windows towards the Gulf, while at other time they dance on the terrace. Within this framework, it is implied on some level that they exchange stories and memories of the past, yet we are never able to hear them. Their

primary concern is not one of dwelling on the events of the past but rather in wiping away and reconstructing the past in an attempt to make the everyday tolerable. Have they been able to forget? How they have been coping with the memory of such a tragedy? We are not allowed to know. We can only make general assumptions based upon the fact that we are aware that they have suffered, but are never told how much and to what extent. In this we are forced to accept the limitations of our understanding of their situation. This is owing to the fact that the individuality of the survivor is kept secret, and instead we see the survivor only as a generic, and indeed mythic, symbol of suffering. We cannot grasp their past even though we feel sympathetic to their condition. We can never know if the traumas of the past have truly been exorcised, and whether or not the seemingly mundane and inane activities they engage in at the observatory have a sort of cathartic function. The presence of laboratory instruments, seismographs and obsolete machines reminds the viewer of our attempts to not only forecast volcanic eruptions, but also other destructive phenomena such as earthquakes or tidal waves. Moreover, the viewer is aware that the protagonist, although surrounded by a variety of instruments, each with a specific and varied function, is isolated from their usefulness as they are unaware as to how to operate any of the machinery. In this sense these scenes are comparable in tone and mood to Durers engraving Melancholia. Both place the protagonist amongst a range of varied scientific instruments, the usefulness of which is immediately called into question by the apparent apathy or lack of understanding with which they are treated. An overwhelming sense of importance thus pervades each of the depictions, as the viewer contemplates the state of melancholy, and is persuaded that melancholy lies in our ultimate ineffectualness against the forces of nature. This sense of ineffectualness is highlighted all the more by the presence in both works of scientific instruments aimed at understanding and indeed combating these forces. Periodically this sense of melancholic time suspension, is interrupted in the film: the sirens sound and we see floods of people of all ages walking down towards the sea, away from the volcano. Their expressions reveal their excitement in re-enacting a ritual of a past that has never happened to them. The footage of those moments, accompanied by the obsessive sound of the sirens, counterbalances the sense of static and calm that dominates all the rest of the film. These cyclical interruptions in the

narrative echo the volcanic explosions which interrupt the daily rituals of peoples lives. The structure reminds one of a Greek tragedy where the choir regularly interrupt the drama in order to comment on the actions of the protagonists. Unlike Greek tragedy however, the defining characteristics of this film are a sense of nostalgia and loss for a hidden past combined with a melancholic sense of stillness and contemplation of how history can ultimately only be perceived as a narrative structure, and never in its true manifestation. The limitations of this constructed narrative are made all the more clear as we are continually confronted with the impossibility of communicating how it feels to truly witness a tragedy. The superficial nature of our collective understanding of such tragedies is therefore revealed and we are once again reminded that collective memory is a myth, and that we can only engage with historical events in this mythical sense. Yet when during the course history a traumatic event occurs, rupturing the accepted reality of the present, the value of such myths becomes evident as they enable us to draw upon our collective history and to gain a better understanding of the present. It also helps us to predict and make provisions for future, and to some degree, empowers us against future traumatic events. It is therefore not history which repeats itself but the narratives we have constructed to interpret it. Even if cyclical, the eruption of a volcano is never the same because those who experienced are never the same. Every person who has ever written about or painted Vesuvius has contributed to the construction of its mythological status. The historical tragedy is therefore decontextualised in the hands of the artist who sacrifices historical truth for the sake of poetic creation. For the love of transmissibility the artist creates a dimension existing beyond past and future, a myth of the eternal present within the piece of art. For Agamben, writing about Durers Melancholia, it is in this eternal present, that man can be rescued from being perennially suspended in the interworld between old

and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original meassure of dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of its actions13.

List of Texts Cited

Agamben Giorgio, The Man Without Content, Standford Californa 1999, pag.114 Benjamin Walter, Naples in One-Way Street, Verso, London 1997 Chateaubriand Franois de, Travels in America and Italy, Applewood Books, Bedford MA firstly published in 1828, (Volume 2) Dobran Flavio, VESUVIUS 2000 - Prevention of Catastrophe in the Vesuvius Area, GVES, Naples 1998 Lewis Norman, Naples 44, Eland , London 1978 Martialis M. Valerii, Epigrammi, Zanichelli , Milano1950 Pliny The Younger, Letter to Cornelius Tacitus AD 79, available in World History, Thomson Wadsworth, Belmont 2007

Francesca Laura Cavallo

13

Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, Standford Californa 1999, pag.114