A set of short audio-visual pieces produced as part of a research and development residency with Vivid Projects, Birmingham. Presented as an online and onsite exhibition at Vivid Projects in August 2021.

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as All sounds and images sourced from rocks, minerals and soil gleaned from the semi-urban landscape of the Stirchley and King's Norton areas of Birmingham. Inspired by ex-Surrealist Roger Caillois’ book The Writing Of Stones, these films sample and extract images and sounds from geological materials and the places in which they are found. The word ‘sampling’ can refer to both the activity of appropriating snippets of sound for use in a musical composition, and to the geological practice of extracting a representative section of earth or rock for analysis. The sample is processed to reveal its composition, its properties, potentials, hidden layers and deposits, unexpected relationships and activity. These films open up a world of vibrant, delirious extraction/abstraction, and through this address a politics of extraction. They consider the ways that we instrumentalise the stuff of this planet, and also sometimes form irrational attachments to apparently dull, insensate things. Who gets the right to designate something a 'raw material' or a 'natural resource'? And how could you love a stone?

 

Septaria (6 mins, 2021)

Lapidary (12 mins, 2021)

Silex (13 mins 30 secs, 2021)

 

Featuring quotations from The Writing of Stones by Roger Caillois (University Press of Virginia, 1985)