Address Performance in the Silence of the Stones
In order to activate a relationship with the non-human world of stones, a speech and action performance with the participation of the public took place at the Pikionis Pavilion in Delphi. The working hypothesis was that terrestrial cultural activity is part of geological transformations. Within this “anthropocene” hypothesis, a temporary activation of our relationship with stones through speech is attempted, on the spot.
The participants each shared a stone from the ground and attempted to describe it in a few words in the second person, addressed to them. The address to the stones was made individually and collectively, in a kind of public ode to geology, which surrounds us as the external world and floods us as the bony skeleton inside our bodies.
COLLECTIVE ACHIEVEMENT GUIDE
- Participants attend an introduction to the concepts of the Anthropocene, geology, the non-human, the originary mythology of stones and peoples, and the genealogical background of Pikionis’s thought on the earth.
- The participants each share a stone, which they describe by speaking to it in the second person.
- The addresses of the few words for each stone are written on A4 sheets of paper.
- The collected stones are collected and exhibited in a stone repository, the “Lithologion”, while at the same time the addresses on the stones are written with charcoal or chalk on the pike paving of the pavilion.
- In the courtyard of the Pavilion remains the “Lithologion”, the exhibition space with the stones and the writings of the participants on the paving stones, as traces of the completed performance, which will be erased by the wind and rain.
The work was presented in the PCAI cultural program Oh, tranquility! Penetrating the very rock, A cicada’s voice, curated by Kika Kyriakakos, at the former Pikionis pavilion, now “p”, in Delphi. In the context of the 2023 “All of Greece One Culture” initiative of the Ministry of Culture and the National Opera.
Photos: Maria Toultsa