Sticks and Stones

Workshop

The workshop focuses on questions of extraction and aesthetics in relation to specific materialities, especially of stone and wood. As a starting point, we want to reflect on different material and processual qualities of rocks, stones or minerals and trees or woods, and the different aesthetic responses and thoughts they evoke. We then aim at exploring how these differences manifest in contexts of extraction, based on the premise that aesthetics does not only apply to an idea of untouched nature. Extraction sites are often associated with negative aesthetic judgments (ugly, bleak, dreary, etc.) while notions like the “industrial sublime” attempt to capture their aesthetic qualities in positive terms. Whereas quarries and mines often strike the eye immediately (mostly as violent intrusions, cuts and penetrations into the terrain, but there are interesting exceptions like the snow-effect of the Carrara marble quarry), the forest as extraction site suffers from a form of invisibility, as new plantation forests tend to be planted on former extraction sites. While this might seem like sustainable practice of replanting, a plantation forest is significantly less bio-diverse than natural growth forest and thus constitutes a notable change in the area’s ecosystem.

We are interested in specific aesthetic affordances of extraction sites where forests and lithic terrain are or were subject to the exploitation of resources. We also ask how extractive processes and practices, for example particular forms of quarrying, mining, and forestry, could be described in aesthetic terms, and how the extraction of minerals and trees or extraction sites are negotiated in the arts (literature, visual art, film, etc.). In a last step, we want to think about the potentials, problematics or dangers of coupling extraction and aesthetics.