A survey on the alpine quarry’s landscape published on La Serena Inquietudine del Territorio #3

In Cesana Torinese, in the territory that once belonged to the Canton of Oulx of the Principality of Briançon, there are banks of ophicalce belonging to the Monte Gimont complex, the so-called Verde Alpi.
The intensive cultivation of the quarries began at the end of the nineteenth century and continued until the seventies of the twentieth century. Marble was used in the Palace of Justice in Brussels, in the portal of the Church of Annecy, in the Subalpine Gallery in Turin and in other minor creations.
I focused on this place of intersection between the natural Alpine space and the areas most intensely exploited and modified by anthropization near the Italian-French border.
Although the intent was documentary, without an a priori negative judgment towards the transformative effects of human action, I felt a strong aesthetic tension in what I observed.
The fascination for these blocks of striated green marble, perfectly cut, almost shiny, pure geometries in stark contrast with the surrounding forest, showed in me the inevitable attraction of man for the alteration of his environment. The cave quarry, a negative architecture, pure space cut into the rock, not addition but subtraction, with dimensions dictated by technique and nature rather than by the human scale, recalled archetypal architecture. Yet all I had in front of me was an Alpine slope from which man had taken as long as he had the technical and economic convenience to do so. Even the wheels for the diamond wire pulleys, decontextualized and now devoid of function,
they could appear to be wreckage, witnesses of man’s work but also objet trouvé, involuntary ready made.
Beyond the aesthetic suggestions evoked by the quarry faces and processing residues, these observations on a limited portion of the Alpine landscape raise questions.
What is the role of human intellectual and aesthetic faculties in altering the landscape?
To what extent are the tendency to alter one’s environment and the ability to conserve it equally inherent in man?
How much does the separation between the observer and the object distance the former from the profound understanding of the latter?