Paleosol

I pose a seemingly impossible question 'can a camera see a stone move?'. Through recording and imagining alongside the stories that many stones hold in Latvia, my camera becomes a tool to question our assumed control over 'nature' and time.

Project Description:

“One night, the Devil carried a large stone and wanted to place it in front of the church doors…The Devil came with the stone across the meadow from the direction of the rectory. When he was near the rectory, a rooster crowed. The Devil threw the stone to the ground and clattered. The stone broke into two pieces. The largest piece is still lying on the side of the road. Some people still see the Devil today at midnight crouching on a large stone on the side of the road”

The Lativijan landscape is dotted with stones and caves named after Velna, or the devil. These stones hold many stories, about a devil figure that left its imprint on the land, through stones, streams, and caves. In many of these tales the devil can be read as the representations of chaotic and unordered nature, one that exists outside of a world of reason that we have been told we inhabit. These layered stories of geological shape shifting have marked these stones as places of worship, keepers of time that have seen more than we will ever experience. 

Today geology has proven that these stones did in fact move, deposited by the last ice age many large boulders and stones scattered across the Baltic region were transported by the receding European ice shelf from Scandinavia. In this compression of time, a particular observation holds true, that stones can move. 

Paleosol asks how such an impossibility as moving stones can become a starting point to question what we hold true about ourselves and nature? In a time where histories are being rewritten and a notion of ‘truth’ has become abstracted, myths and fictions do not seem so farfetched. In searching for Velna and the stones that hold its stories, I enact a photographic process of ‘myth’ building, one where stones allow for many realities and timescales to exist within their grains. 

Quote referance: (1978, 2047; ed. Olga Grīnšteine, born 1895; ed. K. Banga 1966; comp. I. Ruberte, Valmiera County Tales. 1999.)

Background Information:

Around a year ago I was searching for geological forces that defied human perceptions of time, but was deeply rooted and connected to human existence. I stumbled upon many stories in the Baltics around stones that had moved or could move. Stones that were sites of worship and that would listen to your deepest secrets. Stones that were as old as time, and therefore represented a constant in the natural world. Yet these stones, while seemingly still to humans, are on a long journey slowly breaking down and moving at scales we can never notice, except through observational tools that allow us to adopt a more than human vision, and only see their past marks in the landscape. In finding the stories of these stones I was compelled to play with a seemingly impossible question, “can a camera see a stone move?”. In asking this question I was looking for a way to collapse and combine the geological deep time scales of these large boulders in Latvia, with their enduring stories that people continue to wrap around them. To create the images I carried out a process of field research where I spoke to and traveled with folklorists, archivists, and geologists to learn of the stories that many stone sites in Latvia hold. Many times I visited stone sites, trying to soak in and connect to the natural world unfolding around me. When zooming in I noticed that the stones were not merely the site of a defiance of human time, rather the spectacle of the thousands of natural cycles occurring around these stones including the countless human stories and rituals connected to them placed my own presence and the role of the camera in question. This resulted in the adoption of a process of photographic ‘myth’ building where the stories that I collected and the natural spaces I spend time in inspired the production of images that question a human perspective of time and space in the face of stones that were moved and deposited where they stand today by the last ice age. In adopting modes of fiction narrative weaving, I question how the camera itself both reinforces our vision of time and simultaneously can destabilize it, presenting the world in one instance as fixed, yet also providing a gateway to a layered past that transforms what we may consider as true and given today.