Memories of Rock

From the green marble quarries of Tinos to the iron mines of Serifos and the bentonite mines of Milos, the Cyclades’ rich mineral resources have shaped the islands’ social, cultural, and physical environments. Although mining has been prevalent in the region since antiquity, mineral extraction intensified and diversified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Traces of these modern industrial activities are etched into the landscape and collective memory of the island’s communities, anchoring stories of labor struggles, technological advancements, and environmental change. In most cases, the island economies today rely more heavily on tourism than industrial mining. Yet the past, present, and future of mineral extraction in the Cyclades raises urgent questions about economic and environmental sustainability and reveals the interplay of local island histories and identities with global economic, geopolitical, and environmental forces.
Navigating sites of social, historical and geological significance, this photographic series commissioned for Extraction in the Cyclades: Digital Traces project traces a multiplicity of mineral memories across the islands of Tinos, Naxos, Antiparos, Serifos and Milos. Interweaving earthen and archival materialities, the series moves across scales and geographies, linking derelict infrastructures and mineral samples with active open-pit mines and labor struggles. As an excavation of the present and collective remembering of the past, the series evidences the mutable processes by which history is consolidated, communicated and transformed. Images from each of the islands are arranged in five chapters as an interconnected web of relations, encouraging readings between sites and temporalities.
Extraction in the Cyclades: Digital Traces examines these overlapping dimensions of mining and quarrying in the Cyclades, focusing on five islands of varying scale and geological composition with significant extractive activity over the last three centuries: Antiparos, Milos, Naxos, Serifos and Tinos. In partnership with local historians, museums, labor centers and other community partners, Archipelago Network presents a constellation of photographic and audiovisual collections, contributing to dissemination of the historical memory and cultural heritage of mining and quarrying from the late nineteenth century to present day.
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