Superquarry, Kovdor, 2025
The work addresses the structure of Kovdor’s industrial landscape and the processes of its transformation. The composition is based on cartographic data, geological cross-sections, and visual patterns related to the region’s industrial topography. The project explores the relationship between human, technology, and land, viewing the industrial surface as a form of material archive.
The mural captures the interaction of natural and technogenic layers, where the artistic image becomes a means of analyzing territorial memory.
The mural was created beyond the Arctic Circle, in a place where humans literally reshape the Earth’s topography. The city lives by the rhythm of the mining and processing plant, around which an artificial landscape has grown: open pits, tailings, technogenic hills, and reservoirs. Here, the boundary between nature and industry disappears.
The central motif is the vision of the future “Superquarry,” which by mid-century will reach a depth of about 700 meters. This crater, visible from space, becomes a metaphor for the interaction between humans and the planet—a collision of timescales: the instant of human activity against millions of years of geological processes.
The composition unfolds as a visual collage: a geological map, the flag of the Murmansk region, and a satellite image converge on a single plane. Paper graphics reminiscent of engineering drawings coexist with digital patterns, turning the quarry into a mirror of humanity’s drive to understand and transform the world—a trace destined, like all others, to fade. Geology here acts as a parchment on which human presence is inscribed only temporarily.
The project began with an expedition to Kovdor and a descent into the quarry, where massive machines, guided by barely visible operators, bite into the rock, slowly turning the ground into architecture. Later, during the painting process, the rough surface, wind, rain, and first snow made it a test of endurance. It became an experience of inhabiting the state of a human transforming the landscape—overcoming cold, resistance, and the raw matter of the North. The mural itself became a continuation of that effort, a gesture of interaction between human persistence and natural force.