Irene Ragusini | Wearing Matter, Carrying Time

This project explores the material and ecological aftermath of extraction and industrialization through a series of wearable sculptures and hybrid instruments crafted from both geological and urban debris. Drawing a continuous line between the ancient silver mines of Lavrio and the scrapyards of contemporary Athens, the work traces how raw minerals are transformed by human labor into infrastructure, tools, and machines, only to be discarded and forgotten. By reassembling these discarded and extracted materials, the project reimagines their potential not as waste, but as carriers of memory, labor, and loss.

Each sculptural object merges mineral and industrial remnants, combining hand-carved stone with recycled metals, electronic waste, and automotive fragments. These pieces are informed by the anatomy of endangered and extinct insect species native to Greece. Fragmented wings, antennae, and chitinous exoskeletons are sculpted into hybrid forms, linking the ecological disappearance of these species to the exploitation of land and matter. Through this biomimicry, the sculptures become poetic stand-ins for absent life, materializing extinction within the very substances that contributed to it. Far from static, these works are designed as tools or prosthetics—meant to be worn, activated, or carried by the body. The human form becomes a site of convergence where mineral memory, industrial history, and ecological trauma intersect.

The pieces function as speculative relics from a parallel timeline, where remnants of extraction and labor evolve into artifacts of resistance, reclamation, and transformation. Set against the backdrop of Athens—a city shaped by centuries of mining, trade, and industrial decline—the project engages directly with its material history. It reflects on how urban spaces accumulate the byproducts of human ambition, and how these leftovers might be reconfigured to hold new meaning. In transforming matter into narrative and debris into adornment, the project challenges linear understandings of resource use, proposing instead a cyclical, embodied relationship to material histories.

At its core, the work is a call to attune ourselves to the residues we leave behind and the lives that vanish in the process of progress. It seeks to transform the tools of extraction into instruments of memory—objects that ask us not only to look back, but also to carry forward a more responsible and interconnected vision of survival.