Hablar de piedras [Speaking of Stones]

During the operation of an open-cast coal mine, the daily routine involves breaking rock into stones so that it can be moved and access gained to the coal seam. These stones are removed and transported by excavators and dump trucks, which deposit them in heaps, embankments and other spoil-tip formations.

Hablar de piedras [Speaking of Stones] documents 636 stones located across four different areas within the site known as Valdesalgueros, in the northern sector of the Gran Corta mine. The images form part of four books, one for each storage area, presented as unbound sheets displayed on the wall. Photographs of stones are interspersed with a selection of texts drawn from Léxico mineral (Mineral Lexicon) by José Joaquín Parra Bañón.

In its installation format, the books are displayed as loose sheets, creating an extensive grid of stones in which the text pages establish a rhythm that unifies the whole. In their bound format, each volume contains a unique collection of stones, while all four share the same selection of texts.

Valdesalguero I

Valdesalguero I belongs to the photographic series Los suelos de Peal (The Peal Floors). The series documents a collection of Upper Stephanian Carboniferous fossils uncovered during the operation of the Gran Corta de Fabero, one of the largest open-cast coal mines in Europe. These fossils were identified with the support of the Fabero Palaeobotany Centre and were located primarily on the Peal and La Inglesa floors—vast expanses of dark stone covering more than one hectare, where the coal seam was situated and whose names correspond to those of the companies responsible for its extraction.

The markings preserved on the rock reveal a forest composed mainly of specimens of Dicksonia antarctica, Cyathea, Calamites and Annularia, buried some 300 million years ago. Like an anatomy lesson, the wound opened in the landscape by mining activity allows us to glimpse a remote past that speaks of geological time, the deep time of the Earth.

At a moment of profound transformation within the energy sector, the mine’s restoration project will soon return this landscape to its former state, and the fossil-bearing surfaces will once again be covered by the mountain. This photographic series therefore documents a site of significant symbolic and testimonial value, where the deep time of geology converges with the effects of fossil-fuel dependency on the territory and the environmental restoration processes that the planet now urgently demands.