The World we Dig

The World We Dig, is a documentary project exploring the territories and landscapes of several quarries in Wallonia, and their deposits.

Sandstone, limestone, marble and shale are the basis of a flourishing vegetation that has been removed from its ground by machinery. Glittering teeth, unstoppable caterpillars, vibrating crushers and the metals clash in a mighty din; our own thoughts no longer have the luxury of being heard. Once the dust has settled and the noise has faded, in these man-made hollows, an ambiguity gently resonates in this theatrical silence. The rock, revealed to us by the exploitation of the soil, is frighteningly beautiful. The colors and shapes, radically different from the vegetation that grows on top, are offered to our eyes at the price of a deadly practice: ripping the flesh from the landscape.

The World we Dig is made up of images of objects, landscapes and installations, as well as several diptychs focusing on the geometrically simple visual aspect of rock and its landscape, once the stones have emerged from their bed. In the line that separates the two parts of the diptych, time may have been short or extremely long, it doesn't matter. The rock, the quarry deposit, if abandoned in this state, will remain so for eternity: a wound on a landscape scale.