Final show @florida, Genova
As Kathryn Yusoff would say, stone is never just stone: it is a geosocial archive, containing stories of exploitation and care, of oppression and resistance. Stone is mineral writing, an archive of possible forms that unsettle the distinction between the natural and the cultural. And yet, stone is not “outside of us”: it constitutes us, shapes us, inhabits us. In Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett invites us to recognize the vitality of matter: not mere passivity, but a force that acts, resists, deviates, creates possibilities. A form of distributed agency is present in objects: they produce effects, influence trajectories, participate in networks of action.
The recordings and materials that compose Sara Pezzolesi’s installation come from the Marana quarry in Avegno, Liguria: a layered site, both geological and historical, marked by extractive labor and by the memory of the communities that inhabited it—internal colonialism, extractivism. To record the sounds of the quarry means, for the artist, to attune herself to nonhuman entities, to vibrations that exceed ordinary perception and that, through the performative act, are here transformed into shared experience.
The sound installation and fragments of slate activate a listenable environment: they do not reconstruct the quarry, but make it resonate with noise frequencies, urging the spectator to perceive themselves as part of a resonance of material relations. Pezzolesi’s methodology unfolds through the concept of Relational Intelligibility: a practice of knowledge grounded in listening and co-implication. It is not a matter of representing the quarry from the outside, but of letting oneself be traversed by its rhythms, amplifying its sonic traces, translating them into sensorial experience.
Stone, water, air become agents generating nonverbal, post-linguistic, tactile, sonic forms of intelligibility. The spectator is invited to take part in this very relation, entering a field of vibrations where the distinction between human and nonhuman dissolves through technological recombination. Thus recomposed, the Marana quarry is no longer only a geological archive or a site of exploitation, but a sonic source and a vibrating membrane that connects deep time with contemporary bodies.