From Italy’s Maritime Mountains to Motown: Ferrania in Detroit
Ferrania, which is the name of a tiny village, a factory, and a brand, is located in Italy’s maritime Alps in the region of Liguria. You get to Ferrania by taking a winding road up the mountain and through the forests from Savona, a port city on the Mediterranean coast near France. In a mountain valley in the middle of that forest, you find the large, mostly-abandoned industrial campus where Ferrania once was and the compact, multi-story research & development lab where the new, artisan-industrial version of Ferrania is manufacturing film. The film for this project comes from both places. Our color film is expired film made in 2008 before the main campus closed. Our black and white film is new, from the Kickstarter-funded start-up.
One obvious question you might be asking yourself as you peruse this digital space is: why use Italian filmstock for a Detroit-based project? The simple answer is that I am an Italian professor who works in the Environmental Humanities, and I work in Detroit. My research and teaching are based in philosophies of place, and mindful of the creatures and things that inhabit that place. Wherever I find myself, the local context—the biosphere, the cultural and political landscape, the local languages—matters deeply to me.
But over the course of this project, we hope to convince you that there’s more to it than that. The Environmental Humanities doesn’t traffic in simple answers. It’s a field that works with nuance, seeks complexity, and sees the entanglement and hybridity of things. Ferrania and Detroit have things to say to one another.
I was studying Ferrania well before I got to visit the old factory, so my knowledge of it was mediated by words and images, and rooted, in the way that knowledge must be rooted, in Detroit and its suburbs. Via photos and maps, I got to know Ferrania’s contours and borders, like the factory’s 1930s entryway, which you can see in the blurry contact photos below, from a roll of P30 I shot last summer and developed in my friend’s basement. (It looks a lot like the entrance to the Cinecittà studios in Rome, because they were built around the same time in a typical Fascist-era architectural style.)
I started following #ferraniaP30 on Instagram, and at some point, I realized that some of the photos I was admiring captured images of places that looked awfully familiar. That’s how I started following the work of @elsuperbob (Paolo Mastrogiacomo), who used Ferrania to photograph locations in and around Detroit long before the Analog Anthropocene project was conceived. Paolo’s photography was, for me, an early means to study the moody contrast of Ferrania P30 filmstock, because I could measure what I was seeing on screen against things I had seen with my own eyes. I knew that light, I knew those landscapes! It was also an epiphany: Ferrania was in Detroit! And my intellectual “there” was always already “here.”
Now, after a few years, I find that innumerable things connect Ferrania to Detroit. Both Detroit and Ferrania have taught me that the history of the factory has to be a part of how we understand environmental history and environmental justice. Detroit and Ferrania are both places where a huge percentage of the population was employed to make something iconic—cars for Detroit, film for Ferrania—something workers were proud to produce. Factory culture was local culture, in a lot of ways. The jobs were good jobs, in the sense that they were stable and they paid well, even if there were some industrial hazards on the line–and not just inside the factory walls. Some of the hazards were environmental, as the Bormida River or the Rouge River could tell you. Globalization and the third industrial revolution changed the landscape of work dramatically for Detroit and for Ferrania, and now both landscapes bear a haunting sense of loss. These photographs show that loss, and give a sense of how obsolescence can echo from product to factory to community.
The picture above is Paolo’s, and it depicts a former United Airlines building on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn. My online searches show that it has disappeared from various real estate sites, and that it may, as Paolo guesses, be slated for demolition. The second one (below) was taken by Emiliano Guaraldo, a friend and scholar of Italian Studies who is working on a project about the devastating industrial pollution of the Bormida River. Emiliano’s photo shows the back end of the Ferrania campus, in a place where demolition of some of the buildings (newer buildings, actually, not the 1930s-era ones, but post-war additions) started but then halted.
There is a vague infrastructural kinship between these places in these photos, a clarity of line in the buildings, a rightness of angle, an emptiness around them, a prevailing air of loneliness. Both landscapes speak to the lightning-fast arc of the second half of the twentieth century, when products, people, and places were acquired, adored, and then discarded apace. There is a real material kinship between the photos, in that they are shot on small-batch P30 filmstock manufactured at nearly the same time, in a bustling little place right across the road from the old factory wasteland in the photo—and that gives them aesthetic kinship, too, because the high contrast and rich range of grays are something special. There is real intellectual kinship here linking all of the photographers who have taken up their cameras to visualize the Anthropocene and environmental change—kinship we hope to support and nurture as we write about connections we see in the photos featured on this site.
This last kind of kinship is important in these haunting landscapes, landscapes that recall the version of the Anthropocene that my colleague Marco Armiero says we should call the Wasteocene: a time when human and nonhuman lives and places and relationships have been wasted, often in pursuit of profit. Against the Wasteocene, he proposes that “commoning” practices can help us create new kin. In the Analog Anthropocene project, the commons, our shared ground for inquiry, our lingua franca, is the light that hits the silver salts that become the images on Ferrania film.
Armiero, Marco. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
