When he was designing the new government palaces of Brasília, architect Oscar Niemeyer requested for a specific kind of white marble only found in one place in the country: the unassuming state of Espírito Santo. To this day, Espírito Santo is one of the largest suppliers of ornamental rocks in the world. Its mountains have been carved, stacked, and dispatched as far as Miami and Beijing. The industries driving this process frame Espirito Santo’s past and future. They connect the state to the mythical origins of modern Brazil and to the promises of a global market worth about 50 billion US$. But what shape do these connections actually take?

‘Rocha Matriz’ is a speculative documentary that attempts to answer this question through a series of strategies of estrangement. In order to investigate the pressing environmental issues underpinning trends in interior design, the movie calls upon the perspective of the industry itself. By navigating across trade fairs, harbors, and quarries in Southeast Brazil, it traces relations between power and labor in the various stages of ornamental rocks production. The non-human gaze of microscopes, drones, and machine-mounted action cameras is deployed to unpack the contradictory aesthetics of extractivism. A performative narration brings to the fore alien agencies prompted by ideologies of digital totality, according to which the whole Earth could be reduced to and processed as information.