Archive Stories

To celebrate Laguna~B's 30th anniversary, our in-house writer uncovers forgotten stories from our archive and shares the best findings with you.

WRITINGS BY

Caterina Capelli

ISSUE N.02

March 25, 2024

A Game of Encounter

Marie didn’t take up her glass adventure alone.

I’m walking up the first few flights of stairs in the Palazzo, the 15th-century building in Dorsoduro where Marie started Laguna~B from her penthouse. The company’s current offices and headquarters are on the ground floor. Today, I’m visiting the first floor, where our founder’s mother, Béatrice, lives with her husband, Pierre Rosenberg, when they visit Venice.

I recently got hold of dozens of pictures showing Marie at work in the furnace, wearing a white apron, her hands sorting out murrine and other indistinguishable glass components. Flipping through the albums’ pages – where the archivists of Promemoria have finely cataloged the photos – I realize I don’t know much about how Marie got started in glassmaking. I’m here to find out; who better than her mom could know?

Béatrice Rosenberg is an 85-year-old French lady with the calmest aura. She’s expecting me in the salone – a light-infused room with a view of the Grand Canal and a centuries-old terrazzo floor she’s very proud of. She guides me to the middle of the room, where a white, aluminum table-shaped sculpture is installed. “Look, I wanna show you something,” she says. It’s an artwork by late conceptual artist Lilli Doriguzzi called Venice Game. “È un gioco dell’incontro – It's a game of encounters,” she adds. “Its purpose is to meet as much as possible along the way,” Béatrice explains. The rules are simple: An hourglass keeps time while two players throw a dice. The more their pawns “meet each other,” the more points they score.

“Shall we play?” she says. As we do, I ask about her daughter and how she became la contessa vetraia – the Glass Countess – as she was known. “You know, quello col vetro è stato un vero e proprio incontro per Marie – Marie experienced a real, profound encounter with glass. She had always had this creative, artistic personality, making collages and sculpting little characters from wood spheres. But it was in Venice, where she moved after quitting her New York brokering job, that she was able to express her artistry to its full potential.”

An old 'goto de fornasa' Marie received from her stepfather.

Marie’s glass journey started with an old stock of goto de fornasa, the “thick glasses that master glassmakers enjoy making at the end of the day with the scraps from their day's production. Leaving creation to chance, some are masterpieces, others far less so,” – to quote her words from a 1996 fax document.

The goti de fornasa weren’t at all known for their artistry. They didn’t reflect any design or follow any particular aesthetic. Primarily functional objects, they were made casually by melting together whatever glass scraps remained after crafting the “prime quality” batch. As Marie moved to Venice in 1988, her stepfather, Pierre Rosenberg – who frequently visited a little glass shop in Dorsoduro selling old goto de fornasa – gave her one of those glasses. “She was so impressed that she decided to make her own goti,” Béatrice says.

The old 'goto de fornasa' that inspired Marie in the 80's.

From that moment, the Goti became her main activity and passion. In a 1998 letter, she declares: “Working in the workshop from 7.30 AM to 5 PM, choosing the murrine, the glass canes and other little pieces on the spot, composing each glass one by one, gave me the roots I was looking for.” She would wake up early, leaving the Palazzo on her boat, headed to Murano. “She had lunch with us in the furnace every single day,” says Lucio Bardella, one of the first glass masters to work with her. He explains how her approach to Murano drinking glasses was completely unconventional compared to what the craftsmen were accustomed to. She meticulously designed every glass herself, picking even the slightest detail in the compositions and ensuring the glasses didn’t come out looking too perfect. “She loved to pair big and small components to make them a bit askew,” Bardella says. She favored the biggest (thus, the rarest) murrine, insisting on using glass paste instead of a more common ceramic paste for the background. Within a few years, she had codified her own recipe, extracting and repurposing the goto de fornasa’s aesthetic code under a new light. When it debuted in 1994, the Goto felt simultaneously new and soaked in history.

“Working in the workshop from 7.30 AM to 5 PM, choosing the murrine, the glass canes and other little pieces on the spot, composing each glass one by one, gave me the roots I was looking for.”

A 1996 letter to her friend and journalist Manuel Carcassonne contains the description of her crafting process: “It's a game of chance and recuperation that I've taken inspiration from, but with precise control over every stage in the creation of each glass: background color, material, and graphic composition – which I prepare by assembling a selection of ‘canne’ (glass sticks of different sizes and colors), murrine (a kind of glass beads of different designs and sizes), and pieces of glass recovered from the studio where I work.” Then, Marie writes, “The maestro takes a pear-size quantity of burning glass from his kiln and dips it in a colored glass powder that determines the background color. Afterward, he puts it back in the kiln so the powder melts well into the glass. He then rolls this glass pear onto a small iron table on which I've placed the elements forming a design and picks them up. Once they are well embedded in the glass, he starts to blow and shape it. Once finished, the goto is left to rest in a kiln at decreasing temperature until the following morning; the glass temperature is so high that it might explode if left in the open air. So I can only see the result of my work the following day.”

Marie sorting out murrine in the furnace in 1998.

“Every morning, we used to prepare a dozen or so tiny plastic cups for her to fill up. Each contained the exact glass canes and murrine recipe for a specific Goto.” Bardella recalls. “If, by sheer fatality, even just one murrina fell out and we had to replace it with a different one, she would immediately notice. The next day, examining the glasses, she would say, 'I didn't make this one.' She could recognize if one Goto didn’t bring her signature among more than 50 samples."

We spent the last three weeks this month sorting out photos and documents from Laguna~B’s 30-year history, digging everywhere from Marie’s former home studio down to our current headquarters. Marta Dell’Era, a IUAV student specializing in archives who is supporting us in the process, told me: “Opening drawers and closets, I noticed that Laguna-B’s material was mixed with objects and documents from Marie’s personal life. I suppose it’s because Marie’s professional and private life were dynamically intermingled. Making glasses was part of her life as much as being a mother and a friend.”

It’s impossible to separate Laguna~B’s history from Marie’s relationships to those who inspired her and supported her from the beginning: her children, her family, and a nurtured community of friends, and devotees she met along her path. Many of them — whose traces are all over our archive — never left her world.

I recently collected insights from Jillian Gotlib, a woman who became Marie’s friend in 1996. I identified her thanks to a 1999 photograph where she sits next to Marie on a boat returning from Murano. Marie wears a Garfield t-shirt and a light beige jacket, her long, red hair pulled back by the wind. She’s smiling as her friend turns towards her.

When Marcantonio saw the picture, he recognized Gotlib immediately: she was the “Good Gipsy” who used to perform magic tricks for him and his brothers when they were children. As I reached out to her this week, she explained: “The ‘Good Gipsy’ was one of the characters I created when I worked as a music and magic performer, telling fortune and playing the guitar at private parties around the world.” Gotlib frequently visited Marie, and many of the photos in our archive were shot by her husband, Michael Barnard.

“Marie’s professional and private life were dynamically intermingled. Making glasses was part of her life as much as being a mother and a friend.”

Barnard is a professional photographer who, when the two women first met, was working with the artist Dale Chihuly to shoot a documentary about him. It was 1996 and, Gotlib recalls, an exceptional event was taking place in Murano. Chihuly had involved the two most famous glass masters of the time – Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto – in making a series of massive glass artworks he would later install all around Murano. The two were rivals, and never collaborated. Nonetheless, a private event was set up in Signoretto’s workshop, allowing a selected crowd to witness this historical moment. They were working together for the first time. The hype was at an all-time high. Gotlib had accompanied her husband and was helping as a gatekeeper, checking in guests. “I didn’t know who Marie Brandolini was. I was so new to this whole environment… At one point, I saw this woman walk in and go up to the loading dock. She was very petite. Nonetheless, she carried this huge, huge carpet bag. It looked like a carrier bag covered in Moroccan tapestry.” At one point, she starts pulling these beautiful, colorful glasses out of it: her Goti! When I saw these glasses my eyes went brrrrrruuzz,” Gotlib says, “And my husband went gaga for them too.” A few hours later, the couple was tiptoeing up the Palazzo stairs to Marie’s top floor apartment. “Marie had scattered a variety of Gotos around the floor, in different sizes and colors. In a moment, we were crawling around on our hands and knees, picking glasses. I swear it was the most fun.”

Marie Brandolini and Jillian Gotlib returning from Murano.

“From [our] findings, it’s evident that Marie was very much loved; all the letters she received prove it.” Marta Dell’Era says, commenting on the archive. After visiting Béatrice, I return to my office downstairs and peep to see what new material my colleagues have found: papers and photographs that help me realize we owe Laguna~B’s lifeblood to the people whose traces and stories are embedded in these documents. They were the “Laguna~B’s friends” who first believed in Marie’s vision. They understood her innovative approach to glassmaking and praised her efforts to turn a humble staple of Muranese craftsmanship into contemporary functional art. Marie didn’t take up her glass adventure alone.

“Marie had scattered a variety of Gotos around the floor, in different sizes and colors. In a moment, we were crawling around on our hands and knees, picking glasses. I swear it was the most fun.”

Encountering the signs of her legacy myself, in the present, feels like opening a window allowing time to flow both ways, backward and forward at the same time. In this perspective, Béatrice’s encounter game seems revelatory. After all, everything starts with an encounter.