How to Understand a Rock.
by Kate Schneider
portfolio winners call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023', 2023
Category: Anthropology and Territories
How to Understand a Rock is a deconstructed field guide that employs play, touch, and intimacy to discuss the relational disconnect between humans and the more-than-human world.
The rocks in this series come from a shield of Precambrian granite that blankets much of Canada (commonly known as the Canadian Shield) and ranges from 2 to 3 billion years old. While holding these rocks, most of which come from my childhood rock collection, I am struck by the incomprehensibility of deep time and the inexact and absurd ways we try to understand their life and formation. We know the basic structure of our planetary evolution, but when it comes to knowing the exact birth of a rock, we can only say it took between 10 minutes to 4.5 billion years to create.
Moving beyond scientific certainty, I want to know how it feels to cradle an inanimate and essentially unknowable object. Is it comforting? Whimsical? Or even familial? Attempting to relate to something outside the human time scale is a contradiction; however, that contradiction makes human-geological intimacy fascinating.
also from Urbanautica Institute Awards 2023