Encounter: addressing critical materialities in post-extractive urban terrains through Rubbling with stony materialities

The below short film and presentation, where read at : UCD humanities institute: post-extractivist landscapes and legacies conference, July 2023. Pannel 1 After lives of the city of Gold.

Please note this is a revised draft paper.

Brigitta Stone-Johnson.

University of the Witwatersrand, School of Architecture and Planning.

UCD humanities institute: post-extractivist landscapes and legacies conference, July 2023.

Pannel 1  : Afterlives of the city of Gold, convened by Keith Breckenridge and Hannah le Roux

you can find out more about the larger porject on their website

https://extractivistlegacies.org/

INTRODUCTION :

I grew up in a now mined-out coal mining community in Kwa-Zulu Natal; my home in Johannesburg is on the Witwatersrand continental watershed, twenty meters from some of the oldest stones on Earth, fifty kilometres from the place where our earliest ancestors first developed their material engagements with Stone, and about a kilometre to the north of the central Johannesburg mining belt now largely mined out; these locations, separated by time, represent two modes of temporal material relations, extraction and encounter.

My research begins with examining the geological relationships of people to Stone as a vital agent within post-extractive landscapes. It explores the arts as a critical tool for troubling the complex material narratives of living in a post-extractive city in 2023; aims to ground deep pastes to deep futures. It was developing a series of material counter-narratives that challenge a confluence of critical material concerns present within the post-extractive cities of the global south: extractivism, colonialism, and the material issues of the Anthropocene. Holding theory and practice together as a site for knowledge generation. My position to rethink our material relations counters the extractivist impulse and provides a set of coordinates for thinking about architecture in the collapse of the modernist city. It provides coordinates for a different kind of thinking and relating to the material world.

GEOLOGICAL ENTITIES THAT ENCOUNTER GEOLOGICAL TERRAINS

I begin my artistic practice from a geological starting point: Remembering that humans are geological entities who move through and encounter geological terrains. We make our cities from geology; it is both underfoot and all around; the long-since lithified living fills our cities; tar, brick, concrete, and steel are present within our built environments, all made present in mineral form through life and death of billions of living entities. All easily slip back into the realm of the living, as if their lithification were only a temporary state in an endless cycle of geological systems. With a similar thought, Vicky Kirby asks, What if culture were nature all along[1]? Suggesting that if we consider that the ability to think stretches across an entire geologic landscape,  if the natural world is an inventive, agentic along with human actors, then we need to extend our binary imaginaries of how we think and act within it, beyond the realm of human anthropocentric concern. The natural words systems, biological and geological entities alike, become co-labours in our responses to the post-extractive terrain rather than options for human cultural and capital projects.

With this assumption in mind,  I begin my work by going into the terrain and encountering stony materials by asking, What is the nature of stone agencies in the rubbling post-extractive urban terrains? How can we learn to act with those agencies in making terrains with vital and agentic stones?

Within the post-extractive terrain, in a state of disrepairs, I observe that Stone is rubbling,

Weathering,

fragmenting,

It is decaying, tangling and eroding,

flowing,

Piling

Aggregating,

Stratifying

And resisting other inhuman agencies

That As I move through these agentic terrains, I am geology. The walking-talking lithic, made of soil, air iron and calcium, the stuff of billion-year-old microbial beings and their actions and temporarily assembled here as a being that walks, moves, and breaths in living and weathering life worlds. Weather, urban terrain, wasteland, rubble, or natural environment,  I am indistinguishable from the material world and its geology.

Within my work, I deeply explore agentic and vitalist material counter-narratives that have long existed outside of mainstream philosophy, which resurface during times when climate change is a present and existential threat. I frame a posthuman material agency of Stone, paralleled against a philosophical and geological consideration for the agency of the material world. I am drawing on the feminist posthuman work of Jane Bennett, Stacey Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Vicki Kirby. I consider it through the geological lenses of Gaston Gordilio, Jeffery Gerome Cohen, and Vladimir Verndanski, Marcia Bjornerud among other voices. To develop the concept of rubbling as a vehicle of stony materials agency through weathering, fragmenting, and aggregating agencies and post-Anthropocene methodology for thinking with the stony matter in the post-extractive urban terrains.

RUBBLING – COMPOSTING WITH STONY MATTER

In my thinking, I reframe, rubble is a site of biosocial and geosocial relations that transcend the human/matter binary within a weathering and atmospheric medium. Rubble is an adjective, an active process through which matter weathers, fragments, entangles and aggregates with other materials and living things —the processes of flux between solid and liquid, between object, person, particle, and composite. A site of active blurring of the boundary between living and non-living. Compost is ultimately a pile and a microcosm ecosystem, a lively and active site of growth and death personified. As a methodological approach, it allows the body to become with the stony matter. We actively seek ways that stony matter transcends the body’s limits throughout the creative practice. Seeking bodily practices that dissolve the boundaries of binary thinking by folding the body into the flows, folds and weaving occurring within the material world. 

In the process of rubbling, we can think of weathering a two-sided –abraiding and fragmenting on the one end and agglomerating, tangling, and drifting matter within terrains on the other, rather than a process that removes materials only. As I worked through the practice, I began to see that Weathering takes the perfect forms of human material intention and disrupts them. Rubbling materials in post-extractive terrains weather at different rates, according to their properties, often to do with their molecular make-up; materials may be porous, absorbing and staining over time with the things with which they come into contact. Others, such as glass and aluminium, seem to repel other materials, but whether by the nature of that refusal to bond with others, they come apart at the joints and seams. Steel and iron are reactionary; their surfaces quickly rust when exposed to the atmosphere or repeated touch. For materials such as sandstone, or its modern equivalent, concrete, abrasion is a common feature, particularly where there is repeated contact by humans, wearing smooth over time, such as on steps and corners. But water, prevailing wind, sun, and chemical adhesion such as atmospheric pollutants are also abraded surfaces.

Here I draw on the work of Leatherbarrow[2], Mostafavi and Tim Edensor[3], and Bjornerud[4] in think weathering as an additive proccess when viewed through the lens of time in the geological. In terms of weather, and the life of buildings in time, Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi argue that the cumulative process of sedimentation, and the accumulation of detritus, may counteract the deleterious effect of weathering as a subtractive force[5].

Tim Edensor describes sites of ruination as sites of active decay and friction within an urban context. Siting the process of weathering, composting, and sedimentation within the urban context. As a moment of friction which allows a complex reading of urban public life beyond human matter binaries. Where in every respect, the rules are suspended. This is the realm of whimsy and creativity in which human, animal and materials’ agencies entangle within complex dances and appear to suspend normative rules of conduct for all humans and more than human entities. Within vital sites of post-extractive landscapes, the site of rubble is first visible, where stony matter gathers and drifts. Stony matter weathers and fragments, creating a meshwork with the underlying geology. Drifting against fences, and objects, stony matter pools around these forms and gathers into piles and flows of mixed matter within the terrains.

WEATHERING IN PRACTICE :

In paying attention to the materiality of post-extractive terrains,

The practices which flow from my theoretic, historiographical and artistic practice inquiry draw on Donna Haraway’s idea of ‘Being compostist[6]^‘, along with Tim Ingold’s, the concept of wayfaring as knowing through going, to develop rubbling, as the practice of being with non-human others, as a final practice response to the material issues of the Anthropocene terrain.

The practices I developed are simple enough and respond to stony agencies in how they offer up quiet contemplation with stony matter in post-extractive and urban terrains.

Rubbling practices of

Weathering –

Fragmenting –

Aggregating –

Beginning with the process of fragmenting, gathered images into a collage, and moving to fragmenting surfaces with machinery before weathering surfaces with chemical means, rusting iron, oxidising coppers, ruining cyanotypes while making aggregations, and aggregating works in collectivities.

Each practice represents a bodily encounter, a labouring with stony things—time-filled and atmosphere dependant. Taking place over an extended period, they surface a series of critical relationalities that begin with, the body as a geological entity and tool for knowing, being and becoming with non-human others.

Having understood the body to be part of the terrain, those who act with stones and vibrant agencies through creative practice are considered. Practising the process of weathering, fragmenting and aggregating  Stony Matter through body action, the body’s dissolution in practice as it gives way to the stones’ agencies is observed. In practice, one learns not to act towards the creation of object forms or space. Instead, react to the rhythms and flows of the stony medium, learn when to co-labour, and allow the Stone to take over in the creation of the work, in the creative practices. Here the material exploration, particularly in the aggregation of construction, becomes Stony Matter in motion.

Thinking of the stony Matter in rubbling terrains as vital agencies in states of becoming surfaces a counter-narrative from within the dominant materialism of the extractive urge and related philosophical justifications, running counter to and considering an emergent understanding that far from inert, the material world is an agentic, co-creator of terrains. Through the use of fine arts and material-centred practices, with the work, I subvert and question dominant material thinking from within in forwarding material and body knowledge that has existed in the highveld terrain since our earlier forbears first knapped stones for tools in these hills. Holding space for knowing and thinking with things through bodily encounters, where the mind and increasing technology have held the dominant and immaterial positions. This is important as it represents an internal rather than an external philosophical position. In countering dominant material frameworks, one needs not to borrow from non-western traditions but to come alongside them in making, thinking and imagining alternative material futures by drawing on humanity’s deep material relations. Allowing narratives to emerge, which reframe how we think and ultimately act, materiality in the face of the present climate emergency.

Within this research, I provide a series of words, wayfaring, composting, weatherings, fragmenting and agglomerating, all active words, for framing relations between humans and stony matter. These words additionally frame an alternative way of thinking about the knowledge continuum, stones knowledge, terrains knowledge, bodily knowledge, the matter of thinking knowledge, and thought itself, as deeply and irrevocably tangled in research. Thus, the document becomes a rubbling terrain of the creative practice research approach.

RUBBLING – VITAL STONE AS A RESISTANCE TO RUIN WITHIN POST-EXTRACTIVE TERRAINS

Thinking of cities as a series of sites of weathering and composting is useful as it enables one to think of cities beyond their current configuration. Pull would-be sites of voids and buildings’ materiality into a living present by engaging them as temporal configurations rather than imagining cities as a fixed, perfect present. Instead, they become landscapes, enmeshed within the lifeworlds of humans and other Oddkin.

Language matters and terms like ruined, toxic, waste, and code terrains as moral failers, which humans must fix, by coding rubbling as a material agency that resits Ruin. I aim to give pause for thinking about post-extractive terrains, mining, urban and otherwise outside of the extractive urge. Rubbling provides a roadmap for weathering, fragmenting and aggregating materials in these terrains.

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[1] Kirby, What If Culture Was Nature All Along?

[2] Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, On Weathering.

[3] Edensor, ‘Materiality, Time and the City: The Multiple Temporalities of Building Stone’.

[4] Bjornerud, Timefulness.

[5] Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, On Weathering, 16–17.

[6] Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 102.