Extraordinary Beauty of Marble Quarries In Italy & Portugal.

Marble Quarries photographer by Tito Mouraz.
Courtesy of the artist.

Phwoar! I mean, who doesn’t love a little bit of marble action every once in a while? Exactly. With this in mind, today’s post is here to celebrate our universal love of this glorious natural material. Equally, it is a reminder of the work that goes into sourcing the building materials we work with each day, encouraging us all to think carefully of the choices we make.

These spectacular images (shown above) are the work of Portuguese photographer Tito Mouraz presented in his book Open Space Office. Mouraz spent two years touring the open-pit mines of Portugal to capture the transformation of marble quarries hundreds of feet beneath the earth. Small details like ladders and roads can be seen creeping out of the rocks, not to mention the digging machines seen from above, giving a strong sense of the mind blogging scale of these quarries.

As if these images weren’t enough, I also wanted to share an astonishing video by Italian artist and filmmaker Yuri Ancarani (below). Yuri set out for a year to capture the carefully orchestrated process of extracting marble from a quarry in the Italian Alps. The visually arresting scenes depict gigantic blocks of marble getting carved out by monstrous diggers like enormous sugar cubes. Ancarani’s engrossing video depicts one man “Il Capo” (The Chief) who orchestrates the entire operation with subtle hand movements – it’s absolutely mesmerising. It is a spectacular cinematic celebration of the everyday industrial process and I urge you all to watch it. Do it!

Related Stories:
Marble Madness: Part 01.
Marble Madness: Part 02.

Click here to watch embedded video.

Stills from Il Capo by Yuri Ancarani.
Courtesy of the artist.

[Images courtesy of Tito Mouraz. Video courtesy of Yuri Ancarani, via Nowness.]