Feli Navarro


LITHIC CHOREOGRAPHIES:
Affect, Agency, and Matter in Movement

Appendix B:
Stone stories written by the team involved in the process of the performance Hyperstones.

I met this “embrião-semente” stone in 2019, during my honeymoon in Morro de São Paulo-Bahia, Brazil. For those who don’t know, this place is one of the five villages on the island of Tinharé in the municipality of Cairu. It is a paradisiac place, with such a beauty that makes you speechless. I remember being there and dwelling with the crystalline water from the sea, the sand, the trees, the fresh and herbal air, the mud, and the rocks. There I spent my last days in Brazil, it was not only my honeymoon, but my farewell. Also a moment of so many anxieties, uncertainties, letting myself to face the unknown. That unknown in some aspects scared me and during a hike I saw this stone. I went closer, touched, and rolled. I grabbed and felt the texture as well as the weight. It was slim with scars, light in its weight, around 120g. I wondered from when and what those scars were. Suddenly I saw myself in that stone. So small in comparison to all other elements around. It was like an embryo, or a seed when I looked at the other rocks around it. I felt small in that moment of my life; and my own external and inner scars from life were known clear for me. I was about to move to Germany for my postgraduate studies and artistic residency, my first time in the European continent. I needed something to bring with me to remind myself why I was leaving and to ground myself in moments of loneliness or any kind of fear. My husband was about to move to Portugal due to a job offer he got there. At that moment, we were together, but in the next months we knew we would be apart, until one or the other could visit each other. Besides a few photographs, my clothes, and some other personal belongings, I brought this stone with me. First, back to São Paulo, where I used to live in Brazil. Then, to Kassel, in Germany. In 2020, I moved again to another city in Germany, Dortmund. In 2021, I was back and forth between Dortmund and Arnhem due to my Master studies. The “embrião-semente” was always with me, making me company, mostly encouraging me.



I am a porous body.
Wind, water, sand, and numerous little creatures have passed through me.
Strange, when speaking of endurance people praise the water drops penetrating a stone.
Yet, little did they know with endurance and patience, a stone can sail too.
Not just hop in a human being’s suitcase and travel like that.
But travel, with this stoney body.
Hey, if I don’t like you, you would not even notice that I am escaping from you.
I would be waiting for the perfect condition to slide.
Maybe in the darkest night, when you are soaked up in dreams.
Little would you know, I have a stoney heart, and I will absolutely sail away.

A flat meteorite landed, many years ago, from a far away galaxy. Possibly a remnant from a planet, composed of iron, nickel and sulfur, a twin sibling of our planet Mars, crimson red, cold and dusty.
Alien creature, host of tiny living beings in the holes it has. Tiny living beings, descendants from the winds of afar, a far away. Winds full of dust and sea salt that now are released in this present moment, besides me.
Observing you, a strange feeling emerges, a feeling of hope of connecting with wild nature and the quieting of all questions. Lying side by side, looking at the dark blanket full of stars, listening to the come and go of the waves kissing the shore.
An alien creature, host of many stories. I have respect for your wisdom that I notice in the soft contour of your edges, eroded by all you have listened and witnessed in the cosmos and in our terrene meanderings.
I see dark holes in you, that I would like to get into, but that I feel I should not cross. Impenetrable secrets you host. Patiently carrying all the winds inside, souls invisible to my eyes. Breathing in, I am sure they enter inside me, even if my mind cannot tell what they taste like, or what they whisper. Words cannot be given to them.
The best I can do is lie besides, our weight released into the ground, but not quite fully, as both of us are unrooted, far away from home.
Alien creatures unrooted, carrying the winds of memories, of other places, of other souls. Exhaling and adapting to the strange environment around.
At night we lay our bodies bare at the moon, alien creatures, bathed by the silver light. With our eroded hard edges we breathe in, absorbing the cosmic light in our dense structure, polarizing the light through our mineral content. We recharge like phone batteries.
Closing the eyes, dark night, the breeze passes by, entering stories through the pores, whispers from the ones that came, the ones that witness, the ones that are yet to come. Words cannot be given to them. We quietly… wait.

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I no longer hold to my form. If I lose one grain of my body, it will travel somewhere else to form another body. If a harsh wave of water crashes onto me in the middle of a storm, and breaks me apart, I will be entangled with a complex mesh of water and sediment to start something else, always in movement, always multiple. The rock does not end.
We no longer hold to our form. If we lose grains from our bodies, they will travel somewhere else to form other bodies. If a harsh wave of water crashes onto us in the middle of a storm, and breaks us apart, we will be entangled with a complex mesh of water and sediment to start something else, always in movement, always multiple. The rock does not end.
We are sediment from former coastal landscapes, always multiple, always vibrant, subtracting here, adding there. We are lithic, mineral, geological, and petrological.
I am sediment from former coastal landscapes, always more than one, always vibrant, adding here, subtracting there. I am lithic, mineral, geological, and petrological.
Po-lithic-al / Polis / Lithikos / Lo lítico es político / Po-lítico
I go with the tides.
We go with them.
We form a hybrid body of stone-water, at the intersection we meet to create the encounter, the friction, the necessary disorientation that drives us towards a new entropic movement within this tremendous gradient of energy.
I don’t know. We don’t know. But we keep going with the tides. I keep eroding. We keep sedimenting.
The rock does not end.