Wunderkammer²: Anatomy of Wonder
At the Crestola Quarry in Carrara, for Wunderkammer², Laura Veschi presents Anatomia della Meraviglia (Anatomy of Wonder) a photographic installation that tells the story of marble not as object but as world. From quarries to galleries, from workshops to raw blocks: the instant in which stone, traversed by light and time, returns to speak of itself.
WUNDERKAMMER²
Quarry · Art · Gallery
Critical text by Roberto Spinetta
Cava di Crestola, Carrara | 19–20 April 2026
“A good preliminary practice to any other is the practice of wonder.
To train oneself not to know, and to be amazed.”
Chandra Livia Candiani
PREPARING FOR THE JOURNEY
Wunderkammer² was born from an intuition by Alberto Franchi, owner of the Crestola quarry-gallery: a tribute to marble, to the Apuan Alps, and to the world that has been built around this material over the centuries. The quarry is no longer merely a place of extraction, but becomes a cultural space, a device of vision. A place where the mountain ceases to be only a resource and reveals itself for what it truly is: memory, labor, identity.
The journey opens at the headquarters of LITIX spa in the locality of La Piastra, with works from Luciano Massari’s series La soglia del silenzio (The Threshold of Silence): four sculptures in bardiglio nuvolato marble that prepare the eye to see differently, devices of waiting that invite visitors to slow down before entering the mountain’s womb.
ANATOMY OF WONDER
Marble is born from the sea, but lives inside the mountain: every block extracted, every cut in the rock repeats that encounter between water and earth, between the beauty that flows and the beauty that endures. It is this world that Laura Veschi turns her gaze upon, using photography to tell the story of marble not as object but as world, as an autonomous reality with a language of its own.
Veschi's eye does not stop at the stillness of the quarries. It enters the galleries carved into the mountain, the workshops, the blocks and the debris, wherever stone meets hand and machine. Even in these spaces of transformation, her photographic gesture retains the same suspension: it does not celebrate technique, but observes it as part of the material's destiny. In this dialogue between nature and artifice, between extraction and revelation, marble discloses its dual essence: a matter that yields and resists, that offers and conceals itself.
Veschi does not document a production process, but an ontological event: the instant in which stone, traversed by light, gesture and time, returns to speak of itself. Marble born from the sea and made luminous in the artist's hands partakes of the same substance as dreams, a petrified dream, an echo of the constant tension between the solidity of matter and its vocation to become vision.
Anatomia della Meraviglia is presented as part of Wunderkammer², a biennial event conceived by Alberto Franchi at the Crestola Quarry in Carrara, with critical text by Roberto Spinetta. Veschi's photographic installation is in dialogue, within the same quarry, with Spiritus Montis by Filippo Tincolini (world first robotic sculpture carved on a quarry wall), La Grande Mela by Michelangelo Pistoletto, White Slave by Giuseppe Veneziano, and La soglia del silenzio by Luciano Massari.
THE OTHER ARTISTS
Michelangelo Pistoletto presents La Grande Mela (The Reintegrated Apple): a polished marble sculpture inscribed with the memory of a separation, the bite that interrupts the continuity of form, stitched back together with metal staples like a suture that does not hide the wound but passes through it. A figure of the Third Paradise, a place where nature and artifice seek a shared form.
Laura Veschi presents Anatomia della Meraviglia (Anatomy of Wonder), a photographic installation that tells the story of marble not as an object but as a world: from the quarries to the galleries, from the workshops to the blocks, where stone meets hand and machine. An ontological event, the instant in which stone, crossed by light, gesture, and time, returns to speak itself once more.
Giuseppe Veneziano presents White Slave: Snow White materialized in marble, seated on the Panton chair, introducing a further shift in wonder, the wonder that arises from the slippage of languages and the betrayal of the familiar.
THE EVENING OF 20 APRIL
Four thousand candles curated by Martinelli Luce transform the quarry into the ideal stage for the Candlelight Quarry Concert: Giuseppe Califano performs Piovani, Morricone, and Einaudi among the illuminated galleries. Artificial light does not replace the light of marble, but makes it audible. As though everything had been arranged to remind us that beauty does not coincide with decorum, but with an apparition: the moment in which something, at last, reveals itself.
In this vision, conceived by Franchi Umberto Marmi, the quarry definitively establishes itself as a cultural place, capable of welcoming different languages and bringing them back to a unified experience, where matter is no longer merely an object, but the origin of the narrative.
