Piles of discarded marble on various sizes and colors. Visit any marble producer in Greece and this is what one finds at the back of their facility, discarded material. The volume keeps increasing. Sometimes part of it is grinded down to become fertilizer. But mostly, the tonnes of marble stay idle, some monuments of construction. In one case, in the island of Tinos, famous for its green marble long tradition, inquiring about its status and fate, I was told that the part of the waste gets buried into the nearby fields. Back into the earth. It was the confrontation with this paradox that generated this material investigation. Teaming up with the marble waste of Argolida-based producer Marmyk Iliopoulos, I sorted through the mountainous discarded piles in their facility. Selecting material to be reused based on tonality and size. Wanting to go beyond “cladding”, “surface” and “decoration” the material research geared towards making solid blocks out of the marble waste. The selected marble fragments are put into molds, a long research process generated the right mix of aggregate and cement to bind them together. Very little concrete is used in the process as the molds are filled in their entirety with marble. The resulting bricks are cut and polished by hand. They can be stacked, joined into assemblies, furniture and custom compositions.
