LA PUNTA DELLE DITA

La Punta Delle Dita is a three part project about labor, exploitation, the non-consensual removal of natural materials and their return to the earth. Focusing on three major industries – coal, slate, and silk – that emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s and relied heavily on the labor of recent immigrants, the project includes ritual performance, a small edition of prints, and a zine. Along with archival footage, the ritual was filmed in three locations on colonized Lenni Lenape land, including Ringing Rock, the now defunct canal alongside the Delaware River, and the now abandoned C.K. Williams Quarry in the artist’s hometown of Easton, PA.

The title comes from Amendeo Pancotti, a miner who survived the Knox Mine Disaster by climbing fifty feet up an abandoned air shaft, breaking through the dirt covering it with his feet. After pulling himself up by saplings growing around the hole, he led others up to safety. According to his loved ones, he frequently described his escape as con la punta delle dita, or by the fingertips.

The book is 54 pages of research images, text, and personal writing, foiled, risograph printed, and spiral bound. The cover is screen printed with ink embedded with coal, ground to a powder by hand. Printed in a limited edition of 15.

The project also includes three small editions of screen prints that replicate specific items that were used in a ritual at three sites of extraction. Eastonite: several pieces of Eastonite, a form of sparkling green and gray mica which is found only near Easton, PA, purchased from the internet with the intention of burying them back into the quarry from which they were mined. Coal: a small donkey hand carved out of Pennsylvania coal, which was given by the artist’s great aunt to their grandmother, then passed along to them, alongside a photograph of the Susquehanna River during the Knox Mine Disaster. Slate: the artist’s late grandmother’s prized lace curtains, from the now demolished textile factory where she and several of my great aunts worked for decades printed on used slate roofing tiles, purchased from Bangor, PA, the hometown of the artist’s late grandfather.