comrade stone

Developed by Gayatri Spivak, the term Planetarity imagines the whole Planet as a habitation. There is no local place one comes from, there are only points of departures and arrivals. In this view humans are just custodians of the planet with a purpose of care towards others, no matter if it will be human or non-human or even geological agents.*

In contemporary reality we need to go even further and imagine planet and outer space from the perspective of the world-without-us, which is a negotiation of perceiving the whole universe as a world only for us, as the most intelligent form of life, and shifting towards the planet as an impersonal agent without human presence. This imagination does not refuse the fact of life, but recognizes a separation between organic and non-organic and that the existence of Earth and other planets emerge from inorganic forms first of all. This understanding can lead us not only to inventing care for others as the main goal of existence, but also to rethink everything we know about the natural processes occurring in the universe, as well as to understanding ourselves.**

Comrade Stone shows the first phase of research on geological agents from Mexico and Bashqortostan, russia. The narrative of the video story revolves around formation of rocks, minerals and reefs (approximately Permian period); interaction of minerals with erosion and extraction; handling of stones for Aztec culture and Shamans from Bashqortostan; contemporary relations between minerals and some industries.

* Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003
** Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011, 12-14