Listening to Stone
Workshop with Paul A. Harris, Stephanie Heine, and Lukas Quist Lund.
As humans know in their bones, the Earth expresses itself in stone. But this unmediated feeling for rocks gets quickly superseded by seeing the lithosphere as readable – across geology, ecotheory, and environmental hermeneutics, rocks are things to be deciphered. Listening to stone reverses this visual-cognitive intentionality; listening requires receiving rather than reading, immersion rather than interpretation. Listening to stone entails deep centring and disquieting decentering for those with ears to hear. Aurally absorbing stone is corporeal contemplation, incorporating a cerebral-spiritual attentiveness and tacit-tactile engagement. Absorption unfolds as a dual process of anthropomorphic animation of material balanced with geomorphic petrification of mind; one is aesthetically animated and absorbed by the mineral materials they physically animate and absorb. Listening to stone can also raise awareness of untold stories, unseen events, or traces that are not yet perceptible – in other words, listening to stone can direct the attention to what Paul Celan in one of his poems called “songs beyond the human”.
This workshop will explore listening to stone as an ecotheoretical imperative and experimental practice. Lukas Quist Lund will open the event with a listening calibration, a practice developed by the Bureau for Listening. In “Steps to a Geology of Mind,” Paul Harris will propose a petrification of thought, language, and the body; given that vitality is mineralogical, rather than raising rocks to the realm of the living, we should be lithifying life. In “Songs Beyond the Human,” Stefanie Heine will discuss how literature stages rocks and stones as witnesses through which radically non-human modes of archiving and Anthropocene haunting become audible. A series of interventions and conversations will conclude with slow time exercises with stones facilitated by Pierre Jardin. To close the event, Lund will lead a wandering exit, inviting participants to gather and share their reflections from the session. Ample rocks will be provided for all; participants are also invited to bring a stone of their own.
Speakers
Paul A. Harris is an artist, writer, and Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University. Co-editor of SubStance: A Place for Creative Thinking and Past President of the International Society for the Study of Time, he has dedicated recent decades to composing an aesthetic-philosophical-spiritual-literary life in stone. His publications include The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin (SubStance@Play, 2021), Time and Science (3 vols, co-edited with Remy Lestienne, World Scientific Publishing, 2023), and Contemporary Viewing Stone Display (Floating Weeds, 2019. He is working on complementary books tentatively titled Stone Dreams and A Life Written in Stone.
Pierre Jardin is a rock gardener and stone whisperer based in Long Beach, California. Under the pseudonym Paul A. Harris, he teaches Petric Poetics at Loyola Marymount University.
Stephanie Heine is Associate Professor of Literature in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In September 2025, she will start a 4-year research project "Grey Matters: Ecocritical Potential of Lithic Aesthetics" with Lilian Munk Rösing and a team of three postdocs. The project is funded by a Carlsberg Semper Ardens Grant and will develop less anthropocentric, ethical sensitivities for stones through art and literature, fostering more sustainable treatments of grey earthly matter like rocks and stone. The project seeks to elaborate a non-appropriative relationality to rocks and stones that acknowledges their radical difference from humans and living organisms, while not reducing the lithosphere to objects of extraction and exploitation. The alternative is inspired by Victor Shklovsky’s idea that “art exists … to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” through defamiliarisation, i.e. by letting us perceive things as strange.
Lukas Quist Lund is a philosopher, art historian, and organiser working with interdisciplinary practices from a centre of philosophical and artistic "wondering." He explores alternative research-action-methodologies and extra-institutional initiatives and projects, including TRAVERS, SHOUT, The Resting Labs (2024–), Center for Not-Knowing (2024–), 89–sound art learning community (2025–), and Bureau for Listening (2021–), of which he is the artistic director. Bureau for Listening is an artist and research group and publishing platform, investigating and promoting listening as a critical, empathic, and artistic practice that operates nomadically and transdisciplinarily, and strives to engage others in shared practices and projects.
Moderated by Dehlia Hannah.