Allegory of a Marble Floor

The basin of Carrara is being mined at a breakneck pace to yield marble blocks meeting strict aesthetic expectations, simultaneously extracting heaps of marble debris subsequently crushed for the chemical industry around everyday products. Connecting the environmental realities of extraction with an inherently extractive design discipline, Allegory of a Marble Floor juxtaposes the resource's diverse material realities, including quarry dust and by-products, to revisit a romanticized perception of the material. The marble deposit is situated as a complex yet vulnerable ecosystem, inlaying ephemeral narratives of endangered flowers and resistant species re-naturalizing the cracks of Carrara, and colligating the mechanical geometries of extraction in territorial sections of maps, roads and quarry dumps.