Cava
Habitat for what is no longer there
2025

light installation with acryl glass tubes
San Pietro quarries, Monterosso, Grana Valley
Cuneo (IT)

Created during an artist residency in the Grana Valley (Piedmont), “Cava” is a luminous installation set inside a disused slate quarry above San Pietro, in the municipality of Monterosso Grana (CN). The project initially aimed to highlight the human presence still active in the valley — hikers, walkers, inhabitants — by capturing movement through sensors and translating that data into pulses of light: a living archive of presence. But the landscape itself prompted a radical shift in perspective. In the Grana Valley, abandonment is not silence — it is echo. It is not emptiness, but a trace of what no longer exists: voices, gestures, and bodies that once shaped the territory. The discovery of the slate quarry — a series of ten underground cavities abandoned since 1984 — reoriented the work’s focus.
From a place of extraction, the quarry becomes an archive of absences: of stone, of people, of energy. It is a wound in the mountain, a hollow carved into the body of the earth — a kind of anti-monument. Within this void, the installation takes shape as a silent machine that measures absence.
Inside the quarry, transparent acrylic tubes rise toward the low ceiling like fragile vertebrae of light. Powered by real-time data from motion sensors spread throughout the valley, the tubes light up and fade slowly, following a rhythm that doesn’t celebrate presence, but rather questions its disappearance. It is in the moments when the light turns off that the work reveals itself most fully: a quiet heartbeat, marking a time in which nothing happens.
The installation is viewed from a specific point outside the quarry. The interior darkness preserves its meaning: each flicker is a faint disturbance, a ghost signal. The sensors — usually devices of surveillance and efficiency — are reimagined as poetic instruments for listening to intervals, for measuring the duration of solitude.
“Cava” is a work that doesn’t display, but listens. It doesn’t fill, but excavates. It doesn’t recount memory — it traces its echo.

Project realized for EntreNous – Art Residency
Project supported by Valle Grana Cultural Village project, Italian Ministry of Culture.