Matthew Broussard…a day at the office

We received some great photos from the quarry where Matthew has been working for the last two months helping to realize a monumental sculpture for Ugo Rondinone. The quarry photographer, Roberto Toya, captured the intense working conditions of the Moro Serizzo quarry in Crodo in these beautiful black and white compositions.

Matthew Broussard at work in the Moro Serizzo quarry – photo Roberto Toya all rights reserved

The story of the Moro Serizzo quarry itself is quite romantic. Here is an excerpt from that story as told by one of the quarry owners, Mariateresa Moro:

Just before the second World War, my father Giovanni Mario Moro was working as a stone cutter in his hometown Montemerlo in the province of Padua. In 1938, at the age of 24 seeing as his finances weren’t flourishing, he decided to leave his hometown to seek his fortune taking only a few things with him, among which was his chisel which he was romantically proud of. When he arrived at Bolzano he heard of the Ossola Valley and the possibilities of finding work there. This is how he found his way to the Pelganta quarry in Crodo. The quarry belonged to the parents of my mother Gina, who was just a young lady at that time. As time went by, Gina and Mario fell in love, which was a worrying situation because he was too old for her and a stranger to the town and she was too young for my austere old fashioned grandparents. My parents decided to leave their work and their family to get married and start a new life together. This is how our family firm started in 1953: at first they exploited erratic boulders, then in 1963 they bought the family quarry and eventually in 1979 they created a laboratory where the entire work cycle was completed, from the extraction of the stone to its saw milling and to the final workmanship. Sixty years have now gone by since this project started, a project which grew and flourished from a love story. Our profession has evolved over the years, we have new machinery, new methods of working the stone and a different way of dealing with business. Today, Moro Serizzo is owned and run by three women: my two daughters Raffaella and Tiziana and myself.