Belgian porphyry cobblestones were hand-carved until the 1970s by the cayoteux, quarry workers from Quenast, Bierghes and Lessines. Mechanization made that manual labour obsolete: today, crushers and screens metabolize the landscape at a continuous pace, grinding the magmatic column that cooled 420 million years ago into new mountains of crushed stone.

Drawing on a period of observation in Brussels and the quarries of Wallonia during her residency at Q-O2, Florencia Curci explores the hand’s gesture upon stone as a bodily limit to the transformation of nature, a limit that no longer operates in mechanized production. She carries that loss of the body in labour over into sound production to observe and question how the body disappears from the sonic scene as well.

As the end of her residency, she will present a sequence of pieces for voices, hands, stones, microphones, field recordings and speakers.

Florencia Curci is a sound artist, researcher and curator working between experimental radio, sound art and territorial inquiry. She founded the Sound Art Center in Argentina and RADIO CASo, an online space bringing together sound art and experimental music from Latinoamerica.