“What´s more similar to rocks deep time than a human marriage? They both surpass our lives”

 

In just two raspberries, the practice of relating with the more-than-human began with a wedding ceremony solidifying my promise to engage with a creative practice that is based on a loving relationship between human (myself) and stone.What followed became a practice rooted in tuning in with the stone which became the central point of the creative process for the performance: to turn to a stone and commit to listening, learning, loving without ignoring my own humanity or the stone’s stoneness. The question of how does one communicate with a stone appears almost immediately. Making a commitment to stay with the unknowable inevitably means working in a space of not knowing. Scientifically speaking, there is a deep interconnectedness between all beings and a constant exchange of information we are not necessarily aware of; the question then becomes: how do I work with information I am unable to perceive cognitively? I hoped to find an answer through the body: trusting that my senses are able to engage with more than I can translate and following intuition rather than intellect. Corporeally speaking, what my body shares with that of the stone is much more than meets the eye.

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just two raspberries is hanging out at the edges of worlds without desiring anything more than staying with the trouble, staying with the unknowable, the dissonance, the grief, the fear, the love. I can’t say whether it has helped or even affected the stone or anyone else, but I can say it definitely hasn’t left me unchanged.

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the spacetime that just to raspberries inhabits is a poetic manifestation of an ambiguously non-human world: the long stillness of the space is disrupted by whispers of water and stone, time that of a stone: deep-slow-unchangeable-non-linear, a body moving-hiding “between the particles of a stone”, its every movement reshaping the room, a room not only malleable but porous and permeable - vulnerable. In essence, the world of this piece is that of the ambiguity and not knowing that I was met with working with the stone; where not everything is understandable yet you are held enough, enchanted enough to surrender and relate with it outside of cognition or logic.

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Re-imagining the end of the world
“[Beauty is] a reminder that things are fragile”(Tim Morton)
 

just two raspberries hugging places itself right after the end. Yet, it is not a postapocalyptic image that we are met with, at least not in a big sci-fi kind of way. It is a calm, soft, gentle space, full of traces of life.
 

where were you during
the end of the world, i’ll ask,
by the time this is over,
it will be always
already

Maybe the end of the world might look different to what we imagine it being; It is the underlying sense of dissonance, of things almost as they should be, that places this work in the middle of the “apocalypse”: “The feeling of not-quite-reality is exactly the feeling of being in a catastrophe” (Timothy Morton 2018: 2). More than attempting to bring the audience closer to any conclusion, this piece aimed to offer spacetime inside grief; The bitter-sweet melancholy of this work, its emptiness, its stretched temporality and its non-understandability and its beauty are placing us in the centre of an ending.
“We’re not skipping anything, we’re going to go through all the thing in its entirety, and pause all the pauses and staying with the thing itself; we’re going through it… not skipping anything; feeling it all”[ From a conversation with an audience member about their experience of the piece. ]

Because if we are to love the “end of the world” we need to find ways that carry us through it.​​