At first glance, the news is strictly economic. The United Nations General Assembly has established that 2022 will be the International Year of Glass. On 29 December, Ansa underlined how important this is for the entire supply chain. This is a strategic appointment to relaunch the promotion of glass «an ancient material, but which knows how to interpret all the challenges of modernity». Moreover, this year also marks the seventy-five years of Assovetro. On the occasion, its president Graziano Marcovecchio highlighted how glass “has all the potential to contribute to the implementation of sustainable production and consumption models”, and underlined how much the sector has been affected by the dizzying increase in energy costs . Assovetro, Ansa announced, “is planning a series of initiatives that will unfold throughout the year”. News that concerns fragile material by definition and, in the times we pass through, awakens suggestions, associations of thought, reflections.
Since the pandemic has hit our lives, we have had to learn to deal or renew accounts with the idea of fragility that makes us feel uncovered, vulnerable. Sensitive to attacks, bumps, jolts that can suddenly shatter existence. We get news of our fellow men who fall, fall, get lost. We have become a little bit glass. Sometimes it seems that, gradually, the circle tightens around the shelf on which we live confined. As if we were helpless glass figurines, constantly exposed to ruin with no return. And the memory immediately plays its part. Making us find ourselves in the plot of a show taken from a decisive page of the theater of a long time ago: the history of the collection of Laura Wingfield figurines. That “Glass Menagerie”, the “Glass Zoo” that Tennesse Williams wrote in 1944 and which now seems to symbolize our world. The version of the pièce comes to mind, created in 1968 under the direction of Vittorio Cottafavi. Anna Maria Guarnieri was Laura, a reserved, delicate girl who led a life of her own, as melancholy as it was poetic. The glass statuettes that fascinated him drew the perimeter of his imagination, they were synthesis and in some way silent expression of his withdrawal, of his folding: «objects» he defined them, «ornaments more than anything else. Almost all glass animals ». According to him, “the smallest creatures that exist.” These little beasts she knew well. He knew their love of light. The thousand reflections that lit them up if they were exposed to them. She was convinced that taking them out from time to time from the cabinet where they were about to place them somewhere else, on a different piece of furniture or on the phonograph, was a joy for them. Because from time to time it is nice to «change landscape».
Laura was aware of the precarious and perpetually at risk existence of her glass pets. Countless and unpredictable adversities could threaten their slender legs, their long slender necks, their transparent heads. Infinite misfortunes could break down to undermine their provisional equilibrium. Their light grace could be broken and turned into a shapeless pile of small pieces of sharp glass. Shapeless splinters, forgetful and condemned never to be reconstituted again in full existence. Fragility. The same one that unfolds every day before our eyes today. It punctuates the days by announcing an ever new subject that, as easy to destroy as glass, has shattered without remedy. «The glass breaks so easily», observed Laura, contemplating her glass animals with an absorbed air, «no matter how many precautions you take … the traffic on the street makes the shelves tremble. And every now and then someone falls out of it ».