Missing Matters

Beneath the Jura’s highest ridge, the Carrière de Crozet is one of many abandoned limestone quarries—a landscape of absence. In a six-week residency, concluding with a lecture, I gathered my thoughts on its contrasting temporalities of labor and geology, while representing it through sampled datasets and abstract models. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s ‘Landscape as a Provocation,’ the work traced the quarry’s stratified histories to reconstruct missing matters.

The inaugural architecture residency, titled « nebula », took place at @bermuda_ateliers with @truant_school and supported by @prohelvetia

In the surroundings of Sergy (FR) white Jura limestone glistens like bone exposed under torn skin of mountain soils. With a similar glean, open mines are scratched out from the surface to expose and extract lime for cement, concrete and the likes. Within the context of the residency, I propose to reconstruct these territories through photogrammetry. The point cloud becomes a means, not an ends: the model is one moment situated at the furthest edge of time—behind it, the deep shadow of the geological. That moment—should we hold onto it fast—stands to represent the “existing”, or rather the illusion of the existing that has always existed, or a false sense of stability and sureness for it, that it may only change upon our deliberate intervention. But there are, of course, no stable grounds. We can only prefigure what is to come.