The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

The word “tombarolo” rings in the ear like an ancient ritornello, like a musicalized refrain that carries within it, and in this way protects, a popular wisdom that belongs to everyone and no one. The Italian word, derived from “tomba”/tomb but also “tombar”/to tumble, and with the added shade of meaning of the Southern suffix “-olo” (itself a variation of “iolo”) denoting “craft,” “making,” and also “mischief,” describes groups of clandestine local tomb-robbers that found and excavated hundreds of Etruscan burial sites in the hills to the north of Rome, but also across Italy, well into the 2000s. The word’s multiplicity reflects the many roles of tombaroli, from thieves to collectors, from lovers of archaeology to criminal looters, from folk heroes to unscrupulous looters, from misfits to magicians and tricksters.¹ In the lands of the tombaroli, often surrounded by a depopulated and impoverished countryside, the dead are the livelihood of the living. The lootings often involve vast criminal networks of smugglers, restorers, appraisers, private collectors, museum curators, and art dealers. A lot of money changes hands, but the tombaroli almost never strike it rich. Rather than be swindled, they sometimes decide to live quietly with their finds, becoming their secret custodians.

I first felt the full resonance of the word in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera (2023). The force of that single word, its twirling in the tongue and in the ear, its playful mischief and inventiveness, organizes the movements and tempos of the entire film. Rohrwacher’s images become, by association, archaeological, too. They acknowledge the wisdom of a locally accented countryside that lives by forgotten rules, a wisdom that keeps the living and dead in complicity through the murmurs of an endless conversation.

Because of their illegality, the findings of the tombaroli must be uprooted, their provenance undisclosed, and their relation to site, landscape, and memory severed. To release these funeral objects into the market demands this first erasure, one of many more to come. Paradoxically, and with the slight comedic undertones of a tall tale, the tombaroli double here as the proud guardians of centuries-old secrets, above all the precise locations of Etruscan burial sites, established in intimate relationship to the soil. Earlier inhabitants of the land had likely also known where the tombs were but refrained from opening them out of respect for the dead, until they didn’t—tomb looting is an ancient practice. In Rohrwacher’s film, Arthur, a British tomb raider living in Italy, quietly murmurs to a severed head from a looted sculpture, “you are not meant for human eyes.” But not all eyes are human, and there are different modalities of seeing, belonging to the animal and the criminal, to phantasms and shadows. The tombaroli’s excavations are at once a breach and a revelation. Their clandestine excavations participate in two entangled economies—plunder and intimacy—becoming a bridge between the two, proof that there is always another hidden way, often lurking in the margins or underground, even when the entire world becomes a marketplace, or a museum.

The tombaroli are self-taught and rival professional archaeologists in their understanding of Etruscan burial practices, and particularly of the tumuli buried in fields of greenery, of an elaborate underground of which we know very little. They are expert readers of the grass and its textures, sometimes unemployed farmers, and avid readers of archaeology, too, but it is the dead who write on the soil above them, leaving traces in the grass that speak to the living. The agency of the dead lures the tombaroli to respond to them, to join their stories to theirs, to become entangled in popular song and legend.² Remembrance is above all storytelling. The stories of the tombaroli preserve a contradictory relationship to the dead. Theft and trespassing are inscribed in the collective memory as fables of treasure hunting and heroic and dangerous exploits.

The metal poles, the spillone, that pierce the tumuli to detect an underground tomb, the handmade spades, ropes, and shovels, some not unlike the tools that were used to cultivate these same fields just a few generations before—these, too, are a fable crafted by the tombaroli’s hands. Their dirty and broken nails testify to their intimacy with the ancient past, a familiarity bred of plunder. Hands are a means of receiving and passing down an inheritance through the flesh, a muscle memory, an embodied knowledge.

In her Au bonheur des morts, philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret writes about our ties to those who are no longer with us, not as acts of mourning but as ongoing conversations that anchor our present and continue to stratify and deepen what it means to be present. Despret focuses on the dead with whom we have had a relation, but we inevitably also have relations with the dead who remain unknown to us. The tombaroli remind us that to let the dead enliven us with their presence we must know where to find them. They too must have their place. To trespass and to refrain from trespassing are two sides of the same age-old coin—one cannot exist without the other. Both insist, differently and equally, on relating to the dead as matter and sensation, and refuse to be complicit with the border police that would keep the living and the dead apart.

But, as Despret tells us, the dead “put goods into circulation, and that is the most concrete evidence of their generosity.”³ This generosity is a materialized and tangible anamnesis, a beautifully preserved and ornate ceramic vase that contains the wisdom of an entire world. The circulation of these goods bypasses the logic of the marketplace. It moves underground, producing a coalition among ways of being that resist severance, detachment, and forgetting—and because of this never ceases to grow or accumulate. No longer part of a marketplace, the goods of the dead are messages and gifts to the living, a reminder that loss and defeat are never absolute, that remains remain.

The dead are our witnesses. The tombaroli traffic with the dead more than most of us, risking contact, contagion, and ruin. In Rohrwacher’s film, Beniamina is safe only as long as her messages have a listener in Arthur, the immigrant tombarolo. An unlikely figure of the displaced and out-of-place, a walking myth with a chivalric name, Arthur learns to find what has been lost because he himself is lost. At one point, a choir of dead people, or maybe ghosts in a dream, address him on a train and beg him to find the objects they have lost. The tomb robber is, maybe unwittingly, a portal to the underworld, and the dead know that. The strange relationship of the tombarolo to the dead is a form of complicity, yet a difficult and guilty one, too. Arthur’s divination is a compass for the underground. He follows a red thread, unspooled from Beniamina’s knitted dress, fraying like everything else in a film that is made of remnants of older films, and their anachronistic technologies. I wonder if this is what an Etruscan reverie looks like, a dream in which the living and the dead weave together the red thread that gathers them?

One of the first urban cultures in the Western Mediterranean, Etruscan architecture has only survived through its necropoleis, often conceived and organized like cities that mirrored the cities of the living, each depending on the other in a continuum, an intricate network that, like the roots and branches of a tree, grows simultaneously above and below the ground. These cities of the dead are an injunction to keep what is underground close to us because it is what holds and sustains us. By respecting the places of the dead, these underground cities recognize that the dead are still here, differently and with a presence that has metamorphosed rather than simply disappeared—acknowledging the unintelligible rather than simply deciphering it away. Native to the rural land of the tombaroli, and still living there, Rohrwacher is attuned to the invisible and the buried in her films.

In 2019, before her precisely assembled cinematic chimera, Rohrwacher, the daughter of a beekeeper, made another film about burials, titled Omelia Contadina. The entire film is a funeral rite. The filmmaker, together with her friend the artist JR, decided to organize a procession—not unlike the one that appears in La Chimera. To the sound of a traditional brass band, they buried the enlarged portraits of four farmers printed on tarpaulins, two men and two women, in their own farming fields on the Alfina plateau in Italy. These amplified effigies are capacious enough to contain the many, and indeed it takes many to carry them, which is the point. The fields themselves are cemeteries of the biodiversity that industrial monoculture has decimated, together with an entire way of life and a more sustainable metabolic relationship to the land. There are many ways to be and become dead, and sometimes graves are out in the open, yet remain unseen. The eulogy that closes the procession is an expression of gratitude to the “dead” farmers and their labor of care—themselves stand-ins for the dead insects, plants, and trees they had learned to keep and protect, a heterogeneous assemblage of ways of being and non-being that refuse to ever be fully disentangled. It is an elegy to the mutual labor of piecing together a world where many beings co-exist, a form of mutual aid and communal care. The eulogy ends with a note of hope: you may have buried us today, the farmers say, but we now become seeds in the earth that holds us all together, repositories for a future that may one day know how to protect us and so much more. Buried and memorialized, preserved in relation to a future, they become our witnesses, and it is their witnessing that is our true inheritance. The procession was repeated in Venice in 2020, during the film festival, with fourteen boats trailing the effigies through the city’s canals toward the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore. Like La Chimera, this earlier film also unfolds in accordance with an injunction to keep what is underground closer to us because it is the infrastructure of our collective wisdom.

*

My maternal grandmother was born in a small medieval town in the Pyrenees, a town with a name that always sounded to me like a song in an invented language, Os de Civís. This rather mysterious phrase mixes Catalan and Latin and could be loosely translated as “bone of the city dweller or citizen,” as if marking a forgotten burial site, or suggesting that its inhabitants live at once in relation to what supports them and gives them strength and to what reminds them of their finitude and mortality. I must have sensed this without knowing it. I often delighted in repeating “Os de Civís” under my breath as a child, lest anyone hear my enigmatic prayer for something or someone I did not know.

The town—or rather, hamlet—of Os de Civís is an exclave, a national territory that can only be accessed from abroad. It somehow turns the entire idea of what a border is on its head and signals its absurdity. One can only set foot in Os de Civís from Sant Julià de Lòria, a town in the Principality of Andorra. In the twentieth century, smuggling and illegal crossings were a daily occurrence, secrets woven into the fabric of the community. My great-grandfather and the many Republican exiles evading Franco’s regime hiked the furtive mountain passages and dirt tracks of the area for decades. My grandmother, who moved to La Seu d’Urgell when she married, had a very difficult time visiting her native village. That worried her to no end, not because she was homesick (although perhaps she was) but because she could not go to the cemetery and repaint the simple iron cross that marked her father’s grave. This was not about religion; it was about respect and care for the dead, about a sustained relationship to a place that belonged equally to those who lived above ground and those buried underneath it, and to everything in between. My grandmother would often recall her father’s skill at carving wooden clogs for her and her sisters during the winter, hands working to protect children’s feet from the snow. Painting and repainting an iron cross so it will not get rusty belongs to this same genealogy of caring gestures.

After she had a stroke, my grandmother would speak to her father, and would warn him that the mountain crossing would not be safe that night, that he must wait. She was crossing two kinds of borders at once. Hers was an act of care strong enough to pierce through the pain and confusion of body and mind, to break through its enclosure by addressing what no illness could touch: the dead, her dead. Always her father’s daughter, she too had managed to cross through a narrow and labyrinthic path. Maybe her clogs helped.

The objects of the dead are not just things but archives, beliefs, promises, gifts, and companions. They take the shape of the inanimate, communicating through the stories they carry and continue to inspire. That they are enigmas is also a courtesy of the dead, another token of their generosity. This generosity does not reduce the world of the living to the certainties of understanding, but to the ingenuity and plasticity of the mind—to sensed presences that demand acknowledgment rather than explanation. This transformed relationship to the dead is at home with what is heterogeneous, porous, contradictory, unfinished; infinite yet intimately close to the finite, maybe closer than anything else.

The wisdom of my grandmother’s hands seems infinite, too, and ancient: inherited from people I would never meet, handed down by multiple hands. They held onto something that belonged to the many and could neither be owned nor fully manifest. The generosity of the hand is like the generosity of the dead. Making with the hands is an act of memory, the fabrication of a collective history that binds different temporalities together, always knitting them into latticework, and then letting it fray and scatter again into multiple threads, only to be regathered into another singular pattern. This kind of frailty is an endless source of strength, the greater and accumulated intelligence of the common gestures of making and caring. This daily co-existence with the dead is, in Despret’s words, “a cloth with holes, multicolored and never hemmed, in its plurality of versions,”⁴ a multiplicity of red threads we must learn to hold with our hands, delicately.