Dan Scott

“In Eastern Alentejo lie 300 historical sites known in local slang as “abandoned quarries”. Legend has it that these immense marble cathedrals carved directly into the surface of the earth, were originally created by the Marmoros civilization, more than two thousand years ago. However, the Marmaros have all but disappeared from contemporary Portuguese consciousness…”

The Lost World of Marmaros takes visitors on a journey looking at these sites anew. Playfully merging fact with fiction, the component works present an alternate and open ended narrative of the “quarries” through the prism of a fictitious lost culture. The project explores how the presentation and ordering of information, can effect a shift in perception and lead to new associations between place and history.

Sounds of the Marmaros (above)

Performance, 10 mins, self-made instruments and projection.

Above is an excerpt from an Evening with the Marmaros, a multimedia presentation of our work, performed in ProEvora (a society founded in 1898 for the preservation of Portugese ancient heritage) in September 2008. This piece was composed for instruments made from detritus found at the site. I developed a notion of Marmaros ritual music after investigating the unique acoustic characteristics of the quarry. Digital effects recreate the delays and echoes within the site, suggesting the echo as a focus for worship. The piece played with Western notions of the primitive, using seemingly pre-industrial materials and imagining an ‘authentic’ ritual music.

The instruments used are the Marmophone, a xylophone made from industrial marble waste, naturally tuned to a diatonic scale, the metalophone, constructed from metal pegs and screws left from the site’s mining operations, and various metal and stone objects, including a saw and collections of marble fragments.

2 octave marimba made from found marble, 300 x 100 x 20cm (Image of accompanying metalophone)

For a longer, 20 minute Sounds of the Marmaros, recorded in different locations across the Eztremoz and Evora region, click

For more on the Lost World of Marmaros click here.