Performance of Deduction in the Silence of the Stones

To activate a relationship with the non-human world of stones, a performance of speech and action with audience participation 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 the stones through discourse was attempted on the ground there.

The participants were each handed a stone from the ground and attempted to describe it in a few words in the second person, addressed to them. Addressing the stones was done individually and in groups, in a kind of audience ode to the geology that surrounds us as an external world and floods us as a bony skeleton inside our bodies.

GUIDE TO COLLECTIVE PERFORMANCE

1. Participants attend an introduction to the concepts of the anthropocene, geology, the un-human, the ancestral mythology of stones and peoples, and the genealogical background of Pikionis' thinking about earth.
2. Participants each share a stone, which they describe by speaking about it in the second person.
3. Write down on A4 paper the few-word addresses for each stone.
4. The collected stones are collected and displayed in a stone repository, the "Lithologue", while at the same time the addresses to the stones are written in charcoal or chalk on the picnic pavement of the pavilion.
5. In the courtyard of the Pavilion, the "Lithologue", the stone exhibit and the participants' writings on the paving stone remain as traces of the past performance, which will be erased by the wind and rain.

The work was presented in PCAI's cultural program "Oh, tranquility! Penetrating the very rock, A cicada's voice" curated by Kika Kyriakakou, at the former Pikionis Pavillon, now "p", in Delphi. As part of the 2023 institution "All Greece is one Culture" of the Ministry of Culture and the National Opera House.

 Photos: Maria Tultsa