The Mountain’s Breath (De Adem van de Berg) by Sven Gerhardt
A visual archive by Dutch graphic designer Sven Gerhardt.
In the south of the Netherlands, near Maastricht, lies the Caestert plateau, composed largely of limestone. Its northern part forms the Sint-Pietersberg. In the Middle Ages, people discovered that limestone could be used as a building material and began cutting the soft stone by hand, one block at a time. Over the centuries, this industry gave rise to an immense underground labyrinth known as the marl quarries (mergelgroeven). On its walls are inscribed vast records and graffiti left by quarrymen, tourists, soldiers, researchers, clerics, and passers-by from the late Middle Ages to the present day. These layers tell the intertwined histories of both the surface and the underground: the discovery of the Mosasaurus, memories of wars, sieges, and liberation, and even the role of the caves as a hiding place for national treasures such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.
Around 1960, cement companies began mining the Slavante area, putting this cultural and historical heritage at risk of destruction. One of the people who sought to preserve it through documentation was the photographer Jan Spee. He took thousands of photographs, creating detailed maps and annotations that carefully recorded the underground maze. Today, his vast archive is housed at the Historisch Centrum Limburg: the photographs alone fill five metres of shelving, while the entire collection extends over twenty-one metres.
The Mountain’s Breath (De Adem van de Berg) offers a comprehensive and multifaceted record of the underground labyrinth of Mount Sint-Pietersberg. With the knowledgeable and lucid Spee as a guide, it recreates a visit to the mountains. Gerhardt filled the book with curiosities, aiming to preserve and make Spee's cultural-historical and visual observations widely accessible. By interweaving archival material on life in the quarries, it presents a broad selection of images, along with context and cross-references.
Limited edition of 800 copies.
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Title: The Mountain’s Breath (De Adem van de Berg)
Artist: Sven Gerhardt
Publisher: The Eriskay Connection, 2025
Format: Softcover with flaps
Size: 232 × 337 mm
Pages: 416
Language: Dutch & English
Edition: First edition of 800 copies
ISBN: 9789493363038