Kinship is the Technology

Forms of Errantry

The Site of Whispers

KINSHIP TO ANCESTORS

by Jas Morgan and Kai Minosh Pyle

Call

Response

A meteor is suspended, revolving, in a loopy velvety void, bound toward who knows where. A magnifying glass skims over illustrated broadsides of celestial sky-watchers, distorting the documents and forcing them to behave in an active voice—folding time. Devils on the ground, rocks in the sky. A glorious spiky comet as a harbinger of bad things to come. An all-seeing oculus nestled in piles of clouds, transmitting its apocalyptic beams of wisdom back to earth.  Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas was thinking about these things in 1578. Deborah Stratman was thinking about them through Du Bartas in 2011, while prying his centuries-old epic poem, “La Semaine,” back into a state of present-day being for her film, “…These Blazeing Starrs!” In 2022, I’m thinking about a film that Stratman is making that doesn’t exist yet except through our discussions hinting that it will involve the poetics of geology, evolution and extinction, archives of mineral collections, and a 1910 Belgian science fiction novel by J.H. Rosny involving sentient rocks known as “les ferromagnétaux” who unleash a rock-borne disease, effectively decentering human life in favor of the mineral realm.

More from Kinship is the Technology

Geologic Listening Introduction
by Sukhdev Sandhu

Fossils and Rocks: What are they? Who am I?
by Leo Goldsmith

Rocks Speak – Are You Listening?
By Kristen Gallerneaux

Rock The World: a conversation towards Geologic Listening
with Deborah Stratman, Ben Rivers, Cauleen Smith, Otolith Group & Aura Satz