PIETRA

Since 2014, I have been exploring open quarries between France and Italy.
Quarry is a space that gets dug, that opens up like a womb, that gets pierced and empty. The quarry contains
the possibilities of the future, (architectures, sculptures, tombs) and traces of the past (fossils, incrustations,
geological layers ...). This place facinates me. It presents a shaped landscape which seems to me at the same
time deeply familiar. When I walk in a quarry, it's like I'm going home, somewhere where I have not yet gone,
but where I come from ...
I imagine stone witnesses from an archaeological dig, assembling pieces of stones. I draw with the grain of
sand and marble dust extracted from the quarries that I browse. And I photograph these rocks that seem
indivisible but whose faults we see.


" The human imagination that is stretching out – placing the mineral at the heart of the questioning about
the relationship between the human beings and what surrounds them – and that does not claim to transform
stones into artworks any more, but rather to listen to what these stones testify to immortality and immemoriality.."
Roger Caillois, The writing of stones, on 1970

©Cynthia Charpentreau