cornerstone
Stones are the activity of rivers, affects, angels, birds, beasts, farmers, climate, moisture, ships, traders, bodies, heat and light. They come from animals, mines, quarries, stars, and storms. A fixed point of origin, combining the divine, the astral, the elemental and the incidental. Holding the enchantment of all our elements in a union that cannot be reduced to history, value, use, context nor culture. Stones take nothing from the world and are rich in worlds that are not ours.
Humanity and nonhumanity have always performed an intricate duet, there is no such time when our agencies were anything but interwoven. Only through our alliances with materials were we able to humanise ourselves. Imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning distant futures, and The Stone Age is neither distant nor unchanging.
Within stone, modernity touches the primeval, rendering humanity as insignificant. Rocks jolts the vertigo of non-human scale and deep time existences. Its intrusion into every given time and space carries multiple sedimented histories; sending something forward years to come and pulling the present backwards. To work with stone is to sustain its ability to continue speaking; then crashing into now, shaping futures.
Coexisting with all known life but possessing an ontology all of their own, stones forge relations, manifesting a queer kind of life. This is non-human materiality: affiliating, connecting, breaching solitudes, defying exclusive taxonomies, undermining systems.
The very material of collective memory used in landmarks, gravestones, cairns and monuments; stone will outlast everything that it touches. Transporting across non-human time, resisting into a future so distant that no creature will witness its return to liquid and powder. Desert will become seabed and whale bones will emanate from mountain peaks. Its slowness asks questions about what might happen if we learn with the world rather than about it, insisting instead on ancient, tangled relations.
An archive never truly closes, it exists in constant reproduction. And that which is set in stone doesn’t necessarily sit still. Rock has documented all planetary life as mere seconds between catastrophes. The future arrives as it always has, promising ruin. But the geologic span has no comprehensible beginning nor end. Rock marks the point at which understanding fails and if it is to teach us anything about the elemental forces of change, it is that every ruin is a beginning.