Agenda

This talk, hosted within the course “American Literature 3,”  presents Perle di Luce (Enduring Glow), an ongoing photographic and cultural project on the Venetian glass-bead tradition. The presentation will focus on the relationship between the photographic image and the material practice of lampworked glass-bead making. In this context, the bead becomes both a physical object and a metaphor: a small, hard, “indigestible” form that resists oblivion and standardisation, while generating new meaning through each act of making. This understanding of the bead will be read alongside  American poet H.D.’s figure of the “pearl-of-great-price” in The Walls Do Not Fall, where the poet invokes an inner shell — “be firm in your own small, static, limited orbit” — as a condition for spiritual and artistic survival amid the destruction of war. By bringing together this poetic image and the lived experience of contemporary bead-makers in Venice and Murano, the talk will consider how photography can both fix and transform this “orbit” of work. Images of artisans at the flame, their tools, and their finished beads will be discussed as visual forms that protect, transmit, and re-interpret a fragile heritage. The session will include a short intervention by a practising glass-bead artisan, whose testimony will ground the reflection in the concrete reality of gesture, material, and transmission.
Ultimately, Perle di Luce will be presented as a form of cultural resistance: a project that, like H.D.’s pearl, seeks to remain “indigestible” to disappearance, and to generate from within a shared, selfless work of art — an enduring glow that passes from hand to eye, from craft to image, from memory to future.