Excavating what Jeffrey Cohen calls “lithic ecomateriality” the Stone Walks project has navigated the rocky topography of the Canadian Shield, Ontario, Canada, and the Mornington Penninsula, Victoria, the Micalong Creek, Wee Jasper, New South Wales, the Glenbrook Gorge and the Ingar Dam, and Blue Mountains in Australia.
Thinking outside and beyond the logical end point of rocks we consider rocks as queer archives of feeling; as affective and trans-touching relatings between human and more-than-human space-time convergences. In Archive Fever, Derrida argues that archives are not simply a logic of the past but “a question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”
In thinking a queer archive of feeling through Haraway’s notion of inheritance, and queer embodiment as a set of relations between movement, speed, expansion and excess, we attend to political futurities of living with rocks which include colonization, strip mining, displacement, pollution, fracking, and other manifestations of the Anthropocene.
Read an article about Stone Walks by WalkingLab’s Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman.
PDF: Stone Walks: Inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling.
Citation: Springgay, S, & Truman, S. E. (2016). Stone Walks: Inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.