This page is a compilation of research material, found and collected during the research for this project. Below, you can find a very wide ecology of resources, from essays, photographs, videos, documentaries, news articles, official documentation, cartography, websites, blogs, objects, tools, sculptures. These materials played a crucial role in understanding marble holistically, from an animist perspective to a governance issue, a material of expression for classical sculptures before Christ, to the tools that mine and transform this 'resource', from its geological structure, mineral structure and how these different agents have been weaving a network of agents, and actors on the landscape, categorising it and quarrying it for exploitation.

It is a long history woven in or rather — with — time. Much as with any network thread, the possibility linkage is immensurable. The archive thus assumes itself as plastic material, an assemblage, in Fluxus. Furthermore, it reveals not only the selected resources but also the resources omitted.

In this archive, I tried to collect things that were important to me, to my investigation and to the development of this project. It serves only to prove it’s incompletion. Albeit personally, this is perhaps the most interesting point. The incompleteness of this project draws the possibility to be but a provocation, a starting point, to your sensibilities, and your own investigation by revealing the vast extent of these nuanced and interconnected networks often overlooked when gazing the landscape and materials that surround us.

The seemingly anarchic order of this archive attempts to achieve and non-structural and non-hierarchical form of researching. By making things somewhat difficult to find, unexpected connections might occur. Additionally, browsing through different points-of-view, and different disciplines is, an attempt to grasp a more holistic view over these issues. Often in separation, speaking nearly different languages, using their terminologies, aesthetics and imaginaries, archives are compartmentalised, and in here, just as in Borges Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge (1948), reshuffled.

Moreover, it reveals a critical point to this project: empathy, and the scientific difficulty of understanding the world sensitively, and outside of a functionalist, anthropocentric view.

Lastly, it mustn't be omitted that these materials constitute part of my artistic practice. This archaeology of knowledge is precisely the critical analysis of these elements and the possibility of forming new, ambiguous relationships between them. 


— João Gil, 2020

A vida nas pedreiras: Histórias de lutas entre forças desiguais

Synopsis