METABOLIC GROUND II

SUBTERRANEAN TENSIONS / Masua Cave and Nebida Mine, Plaster, 2025

The history of Masua and the Sulcis basin is carved into the soil and stone. What now appears as a dramatic coastal landscape once pulsed with shafts, tramways, and loading stations. The ground was measured, cut, and hollowed, turning geology into a living archive of extraction.


Across the basin, Carbonia rose as a model of coal power. Later, the coast of Portovesme became an industrial corridor of petrochemical and metallurgical plants. The land still carries these layers: toxic sediments, infrastructural scars, and the breath of an extractive past that never fully recedes.