Grey Matters: Ecocritical Potentials of Lithic Aesthetics
The project aims at developing ethical sensitivities for stones through art and literature. Investigating interrelations between the senual and material dimensions of art and stone, “Grey Matters” unpacks how aesthetic defamiliarization guards stones’ radical difference from humans without reducing them to objects for extractive industries.
As the terms “Green Humanities” and “Blue Humanities” show, the vegetal world and hydrosphere are the central focus of environmental research. Despite the “geological turn” proclaimed along with the “Anthropocene”, the lithosphere, which is a major site of environmental destruction, has so far received comparably little attention in ecocritical studies of art and literature. Organic models have predominated since Romanticism while aesthetic processes are often described in vegetal or aquatic terms (e.g. text-textile, flow, fluidity). Likewise, the key concepts of contemporary environmental thinking largely feed on organic matter. The environmental humanities would benefit from a “grey turn” that fosters an alternative relation to the lithosphere and expands the current impoverished cultural imaginary of rocks and stones. Thus, Grey Matters will trace a path of lithic aesthetics from the 19th century to today and explore minor geographies of race and gender.
Grey Matters explores non-appropriative relations to rocks and stones that acknowledge their radical difference from humans and living organisms, while not reducing them to objects for extraction. We are inspired by Victor Shklovsky’s idea that “art exists … to make one feel things, to make the stone stony” through defamiliarization, i.e. by letting us perceive things as strange. In such an aesthetic approach, we see a potential for an ethics of estrangement and separation.
The project seeks an aesthetic sensitivity for defiant rocks that is not an othering. Literary and artistic mediations of rocks and stones prevent us from getting too close while the sensory attention provoked by art enables tangential engagements. To grasp the sensory impact art and literature create by distancing and defamiliarization, it is not sufficient to focus on thematizations of lithic matter and semantic-hermeneutic interpretations fall short. Grey Matters instead centers on moments in which structures or materialities of art and lithic matter intersect.
Mineral Constellations between Romanticism and Today (Lilian Munk Rösing)
This subproject explores the different ways that lithic matter decenters the human subject and engenders an aesthetics of defamiliarization in romantic and contemporary artworks. Contrary to its “organicist” reputation, the romantic period shows a great interest in lithic matter, not only as a theme, but also regarding the works’ structure and texture. Caspar David Friedrich’s depictions of rocks and stones will serve as an exemplary case to explore this romantic lithic aesthetics of defamiliarization which will be connected to a redefinition of “the Sublime”. In contemporary Danish literary/visual hybrid works stone has made its re-appearance as materiality, theme, and generator of forms and narratives. Morten Søndergaard carves words in marble stones, C. Y. Frostholm and Louis André Jørgensen include pictures and stories of stones in their photo-essays. In all three, stone is a figure of resistance to anthropocentrism. Inger Christensen will serve as a vector connecting Romanticism and today in an investigation of the crystal as a (morphological) trope in her work.
The Stones of Modernism and Its Afterlife Today (Johanne Gormsen Schmidt)
This subproject traces a line from Nietzsche through high modernism to its late 20th- and early 21st-century aftermaths, unraveling the tradition’s largely uncharted dialogue with lithic materialities. In response to recent revivals of modernist aesthetics in contemporary literature – alongside a growing trend to reinterpret modernism through the lens of ecocriticism – it asks: What would it mean to take part in current efforts to reframe modernism beyond its traditional embeddedness in the urban sphere, while maintaining its grey tone rather than completely recasting it in green, thereby complicating its vitalist impulses? What is the potential of reading modernism not simply as a turn toward interiority and abstraction, but as a space where the inorganic, without losing its symbolic resonance, also appears as a sensory and material presence –negotiating inner and outer landscapes? And finally, when modernist works insist on imagining themselves in lithic terms – how does this shape the way the reader relates to them, and how they, in turn, relate to their environment?
Feminine and Queer Lithoaesthetics (Stefanie Heine)
This subproject takes the ‘neutrality’ of stone, which escapes biological categories of male/female as a starting point to reconceptualize fossilized gender-conceptions and gain new ecocritical insights. Against the ways in which lithic matter has been gendered throughout cultural history, I will explore works that challenge the familiar binaries juxtaposing associations of male activity, productivity and creation with a mater-materia complex of inertia, passivity, and potentiality. The defamiliarizung inorganic aesthetics I seek to unfold favors the latter ‘negative’ and netural forces. While ecofeminisms have emphasized feminine fluidity, becoming, and connectivity, I will track constellations of women and stone that embrace clashes, breaches, separations, and undoings. Following the lithic traces of Medusa’s decreation, Echo’s disintegrating de-dire and Niobe’s bereavement and dispossession into the present, the supbroject will focus on literature and visual art negotiating rocks as material sites of loss, vulnerability and decomposition, lithomorphological traversals of desire and stone veering towards a withdrawal from the living world, and lithoaesthetic practices of non-interference, letting be and letting go.
Racialized Rock Aesthetics (Sebastian Ørtoft Rasmussen)
This subproject studies connections between rocks, race, and racialisation in literature and art that explore and confront dynamics of power regarding discourses and aesthetics of lithic matter. The project maps a range of emancipatory aesthetics, practices of refusal, and defamiralizations by looking at the way in which contemporary and near-contemporary authors and artists such as N.K. Jemisin, Patrick Chamuseau, Natalie Diaz, and Torkwase Dyson work and write with, on, or about rocks, stones, and mineral matter. It asks how their artworks question some of the universalisms that dominate environmental politics and practices, how they critically engage with the foundational racialisation of geology (both as a science and as an epistemology), and how they explore the historical grounds of colonial passage through mines of extraction and destruction.
- Jason Groves: University of Washington, author of The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary
- Karen Pinkus: Cornell University (emerita), author of Subsurface & Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary
- Wolfgang Hottner: University of Bergen, author of Kristallisationen: Ästhetiken des Anorganischen im späten 18. Jahrhundert
- Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University, author of A Geology of Media
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heine, Stefanie | Associate Professor | +4535336223 | |
| Rösing, Lilian Munk | Associate Professor | +4535329264 |
Funding
Carlsberg Semper Ardens Accelerate
Project period:
September 2025 - September 2029
PI: Stefanie Heine