When a festival in a marble quarry can inspire a new perspective on matter

The straight road – practically abstract geometry – that leads from the sea toward Carrara is a scenic device that makes Versailles pale in comparison. With every meter you travel, everything is dominated by the monumental backdrop of the Apuan Alps, snow-capped even in July; not by snow, famously, but by something that straddles the line between industry and craftsmanship: marble extraction. Even the city itself seems to be swallowed up by this perspective, making the entire scene feel almost metaphysical. This “cheap Stendhal moment” could easily give rise to what we call a design question: how do we perceive marble? This absolute material, this coveted resource claimed by all? Beyond classical sculptures and luxury design, there’s a risk of becoming (oops) crystallized in a kind of rhetoric, where the deepest commentary one can expect is a romanticized narrative of quaint Italian villages à la The Brutalist.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, a deeper insight could come from an electronic music festival. Vox Marmoris, now in its eighth edition as of 2025, began with probably the simplest and most effective idea one can imagine: a night-long party among friends in the marble quarries. And beyond just the name, its connection to the material is total. The project by Olivia and Giulio Corsi, and Matteo Zarcone, has evolved: from a single night to two, and from purely musical to an event intersecting multiple worlds, expanding from the mountains into the city.
The Calagio quarry, on the road to Colonnata, serves as the musical epicenter, this year dominated by the techno sets of Ellen Allien, the refined tones of Bambounou, and the global house of Palms Trax. The event takes place in the yard where extracted marble blocks are displayed, ready to be selected and shipped to the port, while the actual extraction points – the upper quarry walls – come alive through laser projections by Alberto Novello.
In town, curated by Olivia Corsi, other works emerge: robot-carved marble sculptures by Quayola, a new projection by Novello bringing the facades of central Piazza Alberica into conversation, and Row, a sequence of holographic LED displays by Russian-European collective Tundra, placed among the still-unfinished works of the Carrara Sculptors’ Cooperative, visually interacting with the space and with the sound of data flowing through the air we breathe.

Yet the quarry space remains the symbolic heart of it all. Exploring an active or dormant quarry as a performative place is a trend shaping many contemporary expressions, as seen in David Chipperfield’s Cava Arcari in Veneto. But the quarry used by Vox Marmoris belongs to the Corsi family, a company founded in 1811 and lived as a personal life story: “I work in the company now and see the quarries every day, yet I get emotional every year during Vox Marmoris”, Giulio Corsi told Domus, “because it makes me see the mountains from a new perspective: on one hand, the play of lights enhances the walls; on the other, the music makes the quarries speak through their reverberation”. To “make the quarries speak”, or rather, to make them sing. It’s here that matter takes on that new role we questioned at the start. Because while the debate around extraction practices is more relevant than ever – and often includes using quarries as event platforms – here, the connection between concept, event, landscape, and site is exceptionally strong.

There’s a material thread, marble as a participant in both the sets and artworks, and an immaterial thread, where sound is translated into visual signals. Then there’s the human thread: the involvement of a highly diverse community, with quarry workers at the center. These people didn’t just see the festival as something happening “on their mountain” and workplace: they actively supported its organization, and attended the evenings as guests.

The boutique scale of the festival, its “human” dimension unburdened by massive performance demands, gives Vox Marmoris the freedom to experiment. It explores the immaterial, like AlphaTheta (Pioneer DJ) collaborating with Tribe XR to host a VR set inside Palazzo Binelli, opening a critical reflection on space and art: what new possibilities exist when we can create music and experiences untethered from physical media?

It also explores the visual dimension: the light-bearing crane placed in the quarry acts as a nighttime landmark. And it bridges the human and the digital: Novello’s lasers, for instance, didn’t need a data connection to produce their patterns, it was enough to use a laptop microphone to capture the beat coming from the marble walls, sending it back transformed into a visual sign.