Stones May 2021

I spent most of the last year sitting in front of a tall double window that looks out on a courtyard-garden filled with stones. “Gravel” is what we call it when a truck pulls up and empties its load and men rake it out over a 40’x80’surface. “Pebbles” when they are rounded by water; “rocks” when they’re bigger and found in nature, though this isn’t true when we talk about “smooth rocks.” Or do we talk about “smooth rocks”? I’ve had plenty of time to think about these things in the last year-plus. The fine distinctions between types of geological materials – geological objects? – about which I have not informed myself, but prefer to meditate on. Or upon. The way that language cuddles up to, and murmurs around, my stones, attempting to represent them correctly and then, unsure of itself, tries again. Maybe, also, pebbles are rounded by machines? Didn’t I see a video like that once? Or were those gems, or semi-precious “stones”?

All my stones are precious stones. I would have discovered this sooner or later, but the pandemic gave me this time to be with them. When you sit all morning every morning in front of 40,000 objects – I’ll say objects for lack of a better word, and also because they are all different, and how often does that happen? Also, I say, 40,000 with no empirical evidence whatsoever, I’m just making up a number that seems good.

This would be a good place to start naming the potential projects that emerge from meditating on stones.

1. Counting the stones. Obviously, using a sample square meter and multiplying. For a more lockdown-oriented, performance art with nobody looking, meditative approach, I could count all of them in the courtyard. For the scientific sample square meter approach I’d have to scientifically take a few different samples because I know of at least one area (il ripostiglio) that had a more recent load (I don’t like that word, I prefer “gifting”) of stones brought in because of … uneven surface? Visible scarcity i.e. baldness? – I don’t know – and you can see, if you look loosely, that the stones are slightly bigger there.
2. Then again if you look closely you start to perceive divisions, either of typology, as if they were from different batches, whether that be different suppliers, deposits, or seas or divisions perhaps due to stones shifting and settling into new positions according to the movement of wind, the pressure of steps or wheels, possibly even small seismic shifts, probably not but impossible to rule out what happens if, in an intense rainstorm, there’s an accumulation of water that takes time to seep in; more likely, if at all, would be hail, which has an impact and moves slowly through the layers of stone as it changes state, over many millennia of hail.
3. It is amazing to see how stones seem to accommodate each other; to rest, which is both space-efficient, tending towards the compactness which is, I suppose, their nature, or maybe the nature of all things, to settle, which involves a reduction of space; the particular relationship to compactness is also their origin story, no, since they came from giant masses, or were giant masses, that borke up, broken down, broke apart; and one day (if day is the right word) they will be sand, and then dust, and then I-don’t-know-what;
4. Don’t these words look like clumps of stones, and doesn’t each page look like a raked field of stones? Approximately the proportion of my courtyard, too.

Drawing the stones – trying to understand the form of something that has no formal logic, no pattern, no organic etcetera, despite being organic, it is nonetheless unique among all of its kind, more unique than each snowflake because random – both utterly determined by its circumstances, its history, its materials every event that has befallen it or in which it has been an actor or participant – and utterly random.

And if you move it even slightly its form changes and if you rotate it – which you do randomly since it has no axis – it changes totally, and 1000 drawings won’t tell it.

I suppose this is true for everything 3D except for the platonic solids. But the stone seems … an extreme case, because there’s no underlying principle of form.

But when we design we can’t do like the stones. Even though design, too, arises from a series of circumstances, happenstances, materials, and so on, it still has to have a principle of form and a principle of intention, because we are not stones. It’s their privilege to evolve as they do. We’re stuck with our minds.