from dust to light?

Moonstone

Margherita Poli

Student
Margherita Poli
Academic staff
Aart van Bezooijen
Course
S is for Stone
Program
MA Eco-Social Design
Semester
2022/23 WS

Alabaster is a stone with in similar properties to marble and chalk. In Italy, this variety is found almost exclusively in the Volterra area. Volterra’s alabaster is considered the most prized in Europe for its characteristics of transparency, veining, translucency, smoothness. The idea of my experiment was to understand if the translucency property could persist even using the alabaster powder instead of the “raw” material. In my experimentation phase I wanted to make a sort of dough and to test more types of binders. I mixed the alabaster powder with water and two types of flour (rice, manitoba) in different quantities and in different thicknesses. The different types of flour and quantity of alabaster generated different results and translucency levels in the samples.

 

 

A project made in the course

S is for Stone

We investigated the early lifecycle stages of the processing of regional stones (extraction: Lasa Marmo, production: südtirol.stein) in South Tyrol with a special focus on manufacturing waste exploring its material qualities (characterization with Tetyana Drozd), small scale processing (frantoio sociale with studio GISTO), reuse potential (do-it-yourself recipes at BITZ fablab) and digital manufacturing (clay-printing with Druckwerk). The results are documented and shared with at the unibz material library (archiving with Eva Bauer).

Project support and collaborators:
Lasa Marmo
südtirol.stein
Studio GISTO
BITZ fablab
Tetyana Drozd
Druckwerk
Material library
Foto Forum
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