This project draws inspiration from a series of reflections and conversations that took place during the Inter_valli artist residency, a project conceived as an extended site visit across the valleys of Bergamo, with the aim of activating a space for reflection, exchange, and production grounded in listening to the natural context and experimenting with conviviality.
Fascinated by the metal tools preserved in the Woodworker’s Museum of Almenno, I am drawn to them because they belong to a temporal and cultural dimension far removed from my own. I perceive them as mysterious objects, reminiscent of those found in an alchemist’s laboratory.
A place suspended between reality and fiction, charged with philosophical and spiritual connotations, where truth and deception coexist—also through the evocative power of photography.
In this sense, the museum deconstructs the imaginary surrounding objects: to musealize means to freeze a fragment of historical memory that will not return, even though that way of life still survives in certain rural contexts.
The alchemist’s workshop, after all, takes shape from the same reality that works with and transforms nature: the furnace used to melt lead is not so different from the one used to heat wood, and rakes may resemble wands or instruments for fixing mercury.
Even after the disappearance of alchemy, some of its ideals endure: the idea of unlimited progress and the transformation of nature, upheld by science and industrialization, inherits its legacy. Human beings accelerate natural processes, dominate matter, and position themselves as a substitute for time.
Plant grafting or the transformation of milk into cheese are examples of this impulse: transforming nature requires knowing it deeply, in order to shape it—for better or for worse.
