Affannosa lotta per
strappare alla morte
—

On August 8, 1956, in the Bois du Cazier coal mine in the town of Marcinelle (south of Belgium), a wagon badly wedged in an elevator hit a gas pipe and some electrical cables, causing a deadly fire. The accident killed 262 miners of 12 different nationalities. Of the 274 people who worked that morning shift, only 12 survived. The vast majority of the victims, 136, were Italian emigrants.

The large presence of Italians in the Belgian mines was due to the fact that, just 10 years earlier, the Italo-Belgian Agreement for the supply of coal to the war-torn Italy had been ratified. Under the slogan “Arms for coal“, Italian men were called upon to be under 35 years of age, in good health and, above all, with an enormous will to escape the misery of the post-war period and a spirit of sacrifice to help their families, generally poor and numerous. The migratory treaty was signed on June 23 and provided, in an initial phase, for the sending of 50,000 Italian workers in exchange for 200 kilograms of coal per day for each migrant.

After the tragedy, the agreement broke down. The accident marked a great impact on the Italian collective subconscious and on the workers’ movement in particular. Finally, on the 45th anniversary of the accident, it was decided to officially commemorate August 8 as the National Day of Sacrifice of Italian Workers around the World.

In his piece Affannosa lotta per strappare alla morte [Frantic struggle to snatch death], Carrasco deliberately avoids the visual violence of the journalistic reports of those days, but poses a subtle homage to the workers of the Marcinelle accident.

To do so, taking as a starting point the wave of cold and snow that occurred that same year in Italy, he uses the images of a particular news coverage in which the snow levels of various cities of the Italian peninsula are shown through a hand holding a ruler stuck in the snow.

At first glance we can see that it is a visual artifice -in all the cities it is the same hand and they are actually photographed in the same place-, but the visual accumulation of these images, in which the flaws of the original newspaper have been respected, generate a poetics that directly alludes to the depths of Bois du Cazier.