Call for papers: Ecocritical potentials of lithomateriality

Conference.

This conference is part of the Carlsberg Semper Ardens research project Grey Matters: Ecocritical Potentials of Lithic Aesthetics. Aiming at an expansion of the green transition by a ‘grey turn’ to rocks and stones, Grey Matters seeks new aesthetic approaches to the lithosphere, which is a major site of environmental destruction. We are especially interested in approaches that take into account material peculiarities of rocks and stones and acknowledge their difference and separation from humans and other living beings. The project embraces a twofold emphasis: 1) attempting to unsettle cultural imaginaries that devaluate rocks and stones based on strictly drawn hierarchical dualisms between living and non-living entities through investigations of art and literature, while 2) insisting on differences between organic and inorganic matter in dialogue with questions of aesthetics.

By fleshing out genuinely inorganic aesthetics, Grey Matters seeks to develop and conceptualize less anthropocentric, non-appropriative, ethical sensitivities for stones through works of art and literature. We are especially interested in the question of how specific aesthetic approaches enable relationalities that secure distance. To foster “stonier” aesthetic sensitivities and grasp the sensory impact of works of art and literature, it is not sufficient to focus on thematizations of lithic matter. We thus center on potentially defamiliarizing moments in which literature/art and lithic matter intersect based on structural, processual, or material qualities, and are interested in overlaps of what Caitlin DeSilvey designates as artefacts (“relic[s] of human manipulation of the material world”) and ecofacts “relics of other-than-human engagement with matter, climate, weather”. 

At the conference, we want to negotiate different ways in which lithic artefacts and ecofacts are made (by different forces and agents, from human creativity or human exploitation of mineral resources, to weather, time, or geological processes), and how intersections of such literal poieses can amount to a specific aesthetics. In a further step, we invite explorations of the ecocritical potentials of such lithic aesthetics.

Call for papers

Within this framework, this conference especially focuses on lithomateriality (three further conferences will be dedicated to lithomorphology, lithonarration, and lithoaisthesis). Lithomateriality designates relations and intersections of lithic and artistic materialities. Such intersections can, for example, involve the following:

  • Lithic matter used as a material basis of literature or art (e.g. chalk or graphite used for writing, coal or pigments used for painting, rocks used for sculpture, minerals used in digital media); artworks made of stone or including lithic matter, artistic practices engaging with stone; lithic matter as writing tool or writing surface. We are especially interested in works that in some form reflect the specifically lithic qualities of their basic material and analyses that explicitly negotiate such relations or explore material histories that can be put in conversation with the aesthetic qualities of a specific work.
  • Shared or overlapping qualities of lithic matter and material qualities of visual art and literature: stony traits of art and literature, and literary or artistic traits of stone (e.g. similarities and differences between the ways in which stone and writing function as archives; painterly, writerly, or sculptural qualities of stone as Roger Caillois attempts to describe; artworks and texts that assimilate lithic traits, behave or look like stone).
  • Lithic matter that is negotiated poetologically (e.g. when a text reflects on writing with graphite or chalk, on what kind of writing is produced by specific lithic writing materials, and relates this to the way in which the text itself works, like Esther Kinsky’s Schiefern) and poetological readings of lithic artworks or artistic practices.
  • Lithic qualities and phenomena as metaphors for linguistic or artistic qualities or phenomena (e.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase “language is fossil poetry”, Paul Celan’s description of the poem as “erratic language block”, Samuel Beckett’s comparison of sucking stones to the voice, Jacques Lacan’s “lituraterre”, words compared to crystals, pebbles or stones, etc.), including dead metaphors (“written in stone”). Lithic phenomena as images for approaches to literature and art (e.g. Victor Shklovsky’s claim “art exists ... to make the stone stony”, etymology understood as an act of excavating words).
  • Instances in which lithic and aesthetic qualities influence, determine, or interrupt each another, especially when properties of stone impact the material dimensions of literature and visual art; aesthetic affordances of stone (e.g. lithic artefacts like statues that are subject to erosion and weathering; certain artworks or artistic forms that lend themselves to certain types of stones; sans serif fonts which lend themselves to carving, etc.).

We are looking for contributions that address these (or related) points from an ecocritical perspective; this can be through a discussion of works and artistic practices that that explicitly negotiate lithic matter in relation to unsettled environments, climate crisis or the Anthropocene, or through ecocritical readings. Each contribution should address the ecocritical potentials inherent in the specific form or instance of lithomateriality focused on. Such potentials might, for example, lie in a certain inoperativity, when art and literature detach lithic matter from the way it is commonly utilized (handled as a resource and subject to extraction), and open the possibility of a different use. Along similar lines, we would like to address questions of aesthetic disinterestedness as a possible resistance to extractive utilization of rocks and stones. We are also interested the ecocritical awareness that emerges when an attention to the basic materials of art and literature is linked to questions of where a specific material is from and under which conditions it has been produced. We invite reflections on interlinked aesthetic and extractive practices that address the problematics involved in both—on the side of artists and recipients. Moreover, we are interested in discussions about how climate changes impact the lithic basic materials of art, and how this effects reflections on aesthetics. Then, we encourage participants to think about what ecological awareness might add to poetological reflections of lithomateriality, and we are curious about potentially redeeming qualities of “dead” or “fossilized” metaphors, their possible ecological merit (compared to qualities of animation and vitalization that are not only linked to “creative” metaphors but also became signature values in contemporary ecocriticism).

Please send abstracts of no more that 400 words to Stefanie Heine (stefanie.heine@hum.ku.dk) by February 28, 2026.