QUARRY QUARRY
2018 | 4K | 1.85:1 | Stereo | 6mins30secs
Peter Sant’s film Quarry Quarry is an immersive study into man made landscapes that was shot over a period of 4 weeks in Malta and Gozo. Constantly aware of quarries when flying into or out of Malta, these huge scars in the landscape, like someone had taken a huge bite out of the land, a body with chunks of flesh torn from its side.
Experiencing these ever growing and deepening golden holes sustaining an out of control verticality industry of intensive construction and taller buildings, on a human scale these places were a sensory experience; the abrasive clunks, scrapes and shrills from the heavy machinery as it crunches, chews and spits out stone, the beauty of the smooth rock faces and the golden light on the chiseled patterns, the dust, the diesel and most of all how it all draws to a halt at the close of business once workers have left, becoming a kind of sanctum, a place beyond, below, between the sprawl.
Sant’s observational study of a place, the material it is made up of and the people that work it, is forensic and politically charged in it’s approach yet retains a warmth and poetic nature that very much explores natural material and its beauty and desolation through its unearthing.
Excerpt taken from Desert Island exhibition catalogue MCA, Valletta. Group Show alongside artists Bettina Hutchek and Adrian Abela curated by Mark Mangion. Oct. 2018. Text by Mark Mangion.
