2020–2023

Hungary

The Quarry as Witness is an ongoing art-research project developed by R² through encounters with active and abandoned quarries in Hungary.

A quarry is a landscape already transformed by human action. Its exposed strata hold geological time, while excavated walls, water, vegetation, animal tracks, and other traces record more recent histories.

R² approaches these places not as scenery to be represented, but as environments that can redirect the work itself.

The project is grounded in Revealed Realism (RR) — a method of attentive observation, research, and minimal intervention.

We may arrive with an initial idea, but the conditions of the place can change it. The work develops through this encounter. Sometimes the intervention is barely visible; sometimes it takes the form of a performance, an image, a trace, or a small object. What matters is not adding a new form to the landscape, but making something already present more perceptible.

In this sense, the work emerges through a negotiation between intention and place.

Four encounters

The project developed through four quarry landscapes:

Old Gyenesdiás Quarry — where the terrain itself suggested the form of an ephemeral deer geoglyph.

Pusztamiske Gravel Quarry — where animal tracks, exposed strata, shadows, bodies, and threads became starting points for photographic and video works.

Nyirád Bauxite Quarry — where geological time meets the ecological consequences of industrial extraction, and where mineral pigments became part of the artistic process.

Bauxite Lens of Lake Darvash — where a small stag, made from cotton wool and pigments collected from the site, was left as a temporary monument.

Many of the interventions were ephemeral. Pigment disappeared, bodies left the landscape, tracks vanished, and objects weathered.

What remains is documentation, transferred material, memory — and a shift in perception.

The quarry remains. The perception does not.