Apprenticeship to Stone
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2023-05-20T22:49:07+00:00
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The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a work of speculative theory that documents Pierre Jardin’s apprenticeship to stone, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of apprenticeship as a process in which “to learn is first of all to consider a substance…as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted…. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood” (Deleuze, 4). Stone is a primordial substance, what Isamo Nogiuchi calls “our fundament” (in Paternosto, 181), the medium in which humans have evolved and lived. Consequently, it has a deep cultural history: as sculptor Jake Harvey observes, “The heritage of stone is an athenaeum containing a rich repository that, like the material itself, has accumulated over a vast timescale” (Stone, 9).
Drawing on this repository, The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin culminates a decade of composing a life in stone. As theory, it serves as a capsule of Anthropocene ruminations, or a study in speculative geo-philia, which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen theorizes as “an affective interspace where the agency of stone and human ardor meet in mutual relation, in cross-ontological embrace," “a middle region of creation and innovation, a space of convivial wayfaring—experimenting, working, and living together, a place of differences and disorienting danger, a forging of alliance and embrace that gather a world so vast that even stones become fellow travelers along epochal, uncertain, but never uncompanioned ways” (Cohen 252). As practice, it cultivates a mindful absorption in stone, and represents an embodied study in geo-aesthetics, which Katherine Yusoff conceptualizes as “a space of experience that holds relations of nonhuman force between phenomena to blur boundaries and cross inhuman timescales. This untimely quality of aesthetics gives the possibility of crossing incommensurable material and temporal bodies…” (384).
As this digital work, The Petriverse is a world with an arboreal structure of forking paths, where you can branch out, go out on a limb, or follow your whim as you prefer, or prefer not to. This introduction continues for three more pages, before the branching out begins.
