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The Stones are My Ideas of Imagination

Curated by Mike Watson, Museo del Marmo di Carrara
December 2012 - January 2013




An exhibition called “The Stones are my Ideas of Imagination” opened on the 15th December in the Carrara Marble Museum. It was the result of a residency and workshop curated by Mike Watson for the Database Project, organised by Ars Gratia Artis with the support of the Carrara Town Council.
Mike Watson, resident curator of the Nomas Foundation in Rome, invited the artists Graham Hudson, Robert Pettena and Andrew Rutt to work in Carrara between September and November.

During this period Pettena devised a new way of organising a workshop. The artist chose a section of the general public to work with, but then he ran the workshop horizontally. He didn’t instruct the public but rather used the result of the public’s interaction to structure his work.
The title of the exhibition: The Stones are My Ideas of Imagination, is a reference to William Blake. The workshop material became the basis for the new works displayed in the exhibition. Pettena went to the Germinal and Fiaschi anarchist clubs in the centre of Carrara to talk to the miners who work in the marble quarries of Collonata, Torano and Miseglia, in order to explore the concept of anarchy.


© Robert Pettena 2022