Grey Matters: Ecocritical potentials of lithic aesthetics
Name of applicant
Stefanie Heine
Title
Associate Professor
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 7,000,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Accelerate
What?
Even though a geological concept has lent its name to our “Anthropocene” epoch, ecocritical studies in the humanities often neglect rocks and stones. Tracing a path from the 19th century to today and exploring minor geographies of race and gender, “Grey Matters” investigates visual art and literature to expand cultural conceptions of stones and develop new sensitivities for them.
Why?
The green transition needs to be expanded by a ‘grey turn’ to rocks and stones. To achieve a more resource-sensitive society, we have to change our relation to the lithosphere, which is a major site of environmental destruction. The project develops less anthropocentric, ethical sensitivities for stones through art and literature, fostering more sustainable treatments of grey earthly matter.
How?
To develop a new sensory aesthetic approach to stones, material and sensual dimensions of art and stone have to be investigated hand in hand. Moreover, new relations to stone need to be elaborated: Stones resist kinship and animation – the project unpacks how aesthetic defamiliarization guards stones’ radical difference from humans without reducing them to objects for extractive industries.