Series: The Quarry as Witness
Nyirádi Bauxite Quarry, Hungary
2022, 2023
The Nyirád Bauxite Quarry is a former mining landscape shaped by both geological processes and decades of industrial extraction.
Its exposed slopes reveal intense layers of red, orange, yellow, and pale mineral earth. Water-filled basins and abandoned extraction zones coexist with traces of vegetation and later human use.
For R², the site became a place where geological time and the consequences of human intervention could be encountered through the body, through material, and through attention.
The place
The quarry lies south of Nyirád in the Transdanubian Mountains. Its exposed geology includes Upper Triassic dolomite and later bauxite deposits formed within a depression in the dolomite.
Bauxite mining in the area began in the 1940s. The extraction of ore required the pumping of karst water, altering the regional water system. Mining continued for decades before being brought to an end in the 1990s.
Today, the former mining site exposes the material history of this process. The colourful geological layers are visually striking, but they are also traces of a landscape substantially altered by extraction.
We approached the quarry with this contradiction in mind: its extraordinary visual richness is inseparable from its industrial history.
2022 — The body in the landscape
Our first encounter with Nyirád took place in 2022.
Rather than reconstructing the history of the quarry, we entered the landscape physically. Wearing deer masks, we performed a series of actions within the exposed terrain.
The deer had already become an important figure within our practice — an animal associated with movement between different states and with paths that are not always visible.
Here, however, the mask was not used to create a character or illustrate a myth. It altered the body and its relation to the landscape.
The performance became a way of moving through the quarry rather than representing it from a distance.
2023 — Taking the colour with us
We returned to Nyirád in 2023.
This time, our attention shifted from the body to the material itself. In the multicoloured section of the quarry, we collected small amounts of natural pigment from the exposed mineral layers.
The pigments were later tested on sandpaper.
A fragment of the quarry could therefore leave the site without becoming a specimen or souvenir. Its colour became a working material — carrying the physical presence of the landscape into another surface.
This transition is important within the project: the landscape is not only observed; its material can enter the work.
Nyirád demonstrates a central principle of Revealed Realism: the work develops from what the place offers rather than from a predetermined image of it.
The first encounter produced a bodily response. The second produced a material one.
The quarry determined the colour, the terrain determined the movement, and the existing history of extraction determined the context in which both actions could be understood.
The intervention remains deliberately limited.
The aim is not to repair, beautify, or speak on behalf of the landscape, but to make its existing layers more perceptible.
Digital traces:
Instagram · Nyirád Bauxite Quarry, 2022
Instagram · Nyirád Bauxite Quarry, 2023