Marie Haefner

picture editor.

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One of the rarest types of marble in the world can be found in the municipality of Laas in South Tyrol.

To date, it is only mined in a small quarry in the mountains above the village.

Known for being perfectly white, the metamorphic rock is formed by constant pressure on the minerals deep within the mountain.

It testifies to the geological time in the Alpine region.

With "Snow Pillars" Vincent Forstenlechner collects photographic reference levels of the rock and thus stimulates a discursive examination of historical architectural symbols.

Marble is primarily found in statues and landmarks.

The use of the weather-resistant stone at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873 attracted more and more interest for architectural use.

From then on, statues made with the rock from Laas were commissioned in countless European cities.

At the latest since the Second World War, marble has increasingly been exported internationally.

Today he can be found at the 9/11 Memorial in New York, James Turrell's Skyspace in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay and again in the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi.


Through the journey to these places, the marble also becomes a metaphorical container that condenses memory and culture in the most diverse places.

Its special aesthetics become a universal architectural symbol that gives little information about the origin and specific history of the stone.


This dissonance between use and place of origin inspired the “Snow Pillars” project.

The series artistically follows the traces of marble back to the quarry site and shows connections between the material, the landscape from which marble is extracted and the sites that emerged from it.

Forstenlechner's work combines photograms and staged photography with images from the Laas area.

In this way, not only is the path of the marble conceptually traced back, but also a direct trace of the light on the rock as part of the artistic implementation.

"There is no antidote [...] to the opium of time. The winter sun shows how quickly light fades from the ashes, how quickly night envelops us. Hour after hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are pillars of melting snow."


WG Sebald - The Rings of Saturn