Zoe Tzika & Elias Casnovas
“The archeology of a dialog”
Materials used: lime, ropes, metal bars
Quarry of Agios Eleutherios – Pyrgos,Tinos. In order to understand its becoming we searched for memories and traces of the past. We met with people that used to work as marble carvers, or that used to help their parents in the quarry, to see through their eyes. The quarry was revealed to us as both a geological and a human-made landscape. In its shapes, internal structures and forms we see the intersection of geological flows with human cuts. This is the contact point of a slow movement of millions of years with the persistent movement of millions of small knocks. The transition from the big to the smaller scale, the human scale. From this dialog between people and marble appeared paths, houses, sculptures, temples and meanings. The people shaped the material and the material shaped them. An old wise voice said: “you give to it and it gives you back”. Somehow, a form of love. And this is what the quarry is and what we can say about it.
CV
Zoe Tzika and Elias Casanovas are architects whose corresponding works study the relation between
people and their environment in different ways. Zoe graduated from the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki, and she is currently a PhD candidate at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, on the
topic of affordable and sustainable housing. She is investigating community participation and
alternative models of housing. Elias is a landscape architect, having graduated from ETSAV –
Polytechnic University of Barcelona. In his practice he understands landscape as the identity derived
from the dynamics between territory and people. The aim of this conception is to understand how to
encompass cultural and ecological practices through landscape design.
In the case of the fe26 residency project at Tinos they propose a double approach to explore the
relationship between people and territory. They will follow a research process to document
testimonies from the residents of Pirgos, to understand what is, or have been, their connection with
the place in emotional, practical or identitary terms. In relation to this investigation, they will
propose an in-situ intervention on the quarry. This intervention understands the quarry as the
territory in abstract where formal relations are established through the rearrangement of the existing
materials.
