Terragraphy – Cinzia Romanin

Terragraphy

2021 - On going
In collaboration with Thomas Noceto

As an immersion in the manufactured territory, Terragraphy invites us to question the construction world’s future through the subject of material’s origins, their reuse and their environmental impact. Based on the need to distance ourselves from energy-intensive and polluting building materials such as concrete, this project investigates more precisely the raw earth alternative.

Wishing to transmit the desire to put our hands in the earth to reconnect with this living body that has vanished beneath the asphalt of our cities, Cinzia and Thomas went to meet craftspeople. Fighting against lobbies and regulation laws, those artisans are defending a local material whose wide virtue’s range has been however proved on constructions that have stood the test of time. Striving to democratise this handcrafted approach, Terragraphy reveals a relatively unknown imagery made up of specific gestures and vernacular tools transmitted from generation to generation, gender-equally construction sites and reused excavated soils which are still too often considered as waste by the industry.

Terragraphy

Inspired by Lavoisier’s idea that “Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed”, this visual research proposes to enhance raw earth as a creative body to convey the poetry of a material which can be reshaped ad infinitum and reintegrated into its original soil without any alteration.

By using handcrafted clay-made films and earth pigments, this project has then been an opportunity to dare and invent sensitive explorations in which the subject becomes the object as a substantial fragment of reality. Due to its affinity with light-sensitive processes, the denomination ‘Terragraphy’ has been invented to describe a practice that reveals each landscape through its own materiality.

Terragraphy