MATER
Mineral Fragments, Sphalerite and Galena, 210 × 90 cm, 2025
IoDeposito Collection
From the collected stories, the figure of the mother emerges powerfully, intertwined with the mining world: the mine as a mother capable of generating and taking away life. It is from this image that the title of the project is born: Mater.
In ancient thought, the root of mater refers to primordial substance: from it derives materia, that which generates forms. Material nature was understood as a maternal principle, the origin and matrix of the world. Mater is a stele that commemorates the continuity between humankind and nature. The shovel is composed of fragments from the Cave del Predil mine: a union of mineral rock that binds death and life, labor, memory, and matter. Its sacred form evokes ritual while also recalling the harshness of underground work. Mater becomes a place in which the mine—woman and mother—both gives and takes life.
The Raibl mine (Cave del Predil), active since pre-Roman times, was for centuries one of the principal Alpine deposits of lead and zinc (sphalerite and galena). Today, closed since 1991, it forms part of a museum route within the International Geomineral Park. The project gathers the miners’ collective imagination: the mine as a ‘mother’ who generates matter and life, yet demands a price. The fragmented shovel preserves this contradiction—a stone relic and a working body, a monument to generation and loss, a site that celebrates the indissoluble bond between the womb of the earth and the community that lives from it.
