Stone Paper

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Observing

I imagine you’ve had the chance to observe the cracks, folds, and contours of rocks—sometimes fleetingly, sometimes for hours.

Crack, “a very narrow space between parts of something”, according to the dictionary. It is an elongated fissure, the breaking of continuity, an interruption of unity.

Line, “a long, thin mark on the surface of something”, “a long, thin and sometimes imaginary mark that forms the edge, border, or limit of something”. [6]

The line of a drawing – a boundary that divides and separates a surface.

Crack lines, lines of a drawing.

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The Drawings of the Cracks

Cracks, folds, and contours of rocks, “lines” of an endless drawing on a “wrinkled” surface.

This is the surface of a different kind of paper: stone paper.

Stone has served as a writing surface in ancient times. Today, stone paper is considered a bio-plastic, a mineral paper made of stone powder that is more resistant to tearing, waterproof, and much softer than tree paper.

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The Landscape of the Cracks

The landscape here is a vast “stone paper” surface.

Over time, the waves gradually revealed the geological composition, the direction of its ridges, and the texture of this “paper.”

The sea has worked on this paper diligently and unceasingly.

With the friction and the touch of its waves,

it carved and dug it into hollows, recesses, and steps,

revealing that the layers of this paper are extended horizontally and also vertically,

forming the bark of a giant stone trunk in one place,

and a strange three-dimensional grid in another.

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The Reverie of the Lines

In the reverie of lines, folds, and contours, the eye can get lost in different times and scales.

On one hand, you observe the drawings and sculptures up close;

on the other, you view the site from afar, lost in thoughts and speculations about geological cosmogonic stories.

Under a humanistic view, these geological histories and landscape might seem untouched, authentic, or from another time. However, with a post-humanist approach, we are entangled with these geological stories and their “works” in an experience akin to encountering an artwork.

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Beyond the Anthropocene

The landscape here is not Anthropocene; there is no interference or interweaving of our “civilization” in it. Geology, as a colonial category of praxis and dispossession[1], is absent.

And because the Anthropocene’s barbaric writing is absent, we are allowed to think and feel the earth beyond property and other human approaches.

Geological stories compel us to ‘read’ them from the commons, the non-human, and, above all, as entangled.

Where bodies are sculpted and admired in their entanglement, the encounter with these geological artworks changes us; we are no longer the same.

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Unexpected Ramifications

The gaze follows the traces.

It gets lost in the cracklines and their endless rhizomatic ramifications, their interruptions and displacements.

In the flows of cracks and folds, unexpected encounters can occur.

Figures from the primitive paintings of the cavemen, from those sheltered cavities that marked the beginning of habitation, consciousness, and the beginning of art or, as Bataille says in “The Birth of Art: the Lascaux Paintings”, the beginning of play, as a reaction to the first traces of the world of tools.

Figures from the primitive paintings of the cavemen, from those sheltered cavities that marked the beginning of the Inhabitat, as well as the consciousness, and that of the art—or as Bataille says in “The Birth of Art: The Lascaux Paintings,” the beginning of play as a reaction to the first traces of the world of tools.

“The birth of art (or play)…an opposition to the world that existed, the world of utensils…but without this world the protest could not have been embodied.“[2]

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Artistic Encounters

Thus, the gaze wanders, and the imagination can enjoy countless compositions and paintings. Geometric abstraction, formalistic repetitive motifs reminiscent of Pablo Palazuelo’s paintings, excerpts of cubist lines from Braque’s work, or Fahrelnissa Zeid, pieces of marble from Brancusi’s atelier, and so on —all sculpted by the sea’s ripples.

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Sea as Sculptor

As in ancient stone quarrying techniques, the sea first locates sensitive points and holes in the rocks, then cracks and gradually opens them up. Or, simply, by using the gentler, almost invisible, unimaginably persistent technique of friction, it sculpts them. With its watery chisels, the sea tirelessly works to “open the form.” Through its constant touch, the sea created this unexpected cavity and organized this sculptural surface into “slices,” “plates,” and fragments.

The touch of the sea is soft for us, who, in a sense, are made of the same material. But for rocks and stones—the “solid and hard minerals”—the constant touches of the sea become sandpaper of almost zero hardness.

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Landscape as a Work of Art

The endless watery caresses and frictions, with the repeated movements and micro-frictions of hundreds of thousands of years, transform together with the rocky crust our emotions and our imaginary.

Some time ago, the magnetic field of a rocky cavity moved me. It matters little where this field is located, as it could be anywhere. What matters, however, are the feelings and questions it raised. Is this landscape a work of art? Or is it an imaginary product? Are we open to their interpretation, or does the artwork itself open us up? If we are a subject and it is an object, why does our identity almost lost in its wandering? Why, after our encounter with it, is nothing the same anymore? Why is it no longer an indifferent object, and we are no longer unconcerned spectators?

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“the art work ´speaks´to us. It is also a dynamic event, because it takes time to complete; there is a chronological order of perception, development and fulfilment. It is ‘ a perceived relation between doing and undergoing’, according to dewey (2005, 48). …this merging of surrender and controlled action creates the experience”[3].

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