If we cannot really make the stones speak, we can at least try to speak about them, about what they evoke, the memories they revive and the benefits they bring. Thus Bérengère Cournut sets out to “understand what is at stake in our relationship with minerals and, more broadly, with the Earth that we roll under our feet, the secrets buried in its depths.”
Addressing a recently deceased friend who had a real passion for stones, she sketches the memory of this man and the way his fascination with minerals had transformed his relationship to the world, to the point of making sensations and questions from her own childhood resonate in her mind. Contrasting the brevity of human existence with the long life of stones, she looks for the layers of history and geography they carry, the poetry they conceal as well as the infinite possibilities of transformation and regeneration that they carry, potential remedies to the madness that lurks insidiously.
