By: Callum Bradley, Georgia Perkins
In: Antennae
Excerpt
The space of Berrigan’s video works intimately in-human. The artist’s onscreen writing asks, “who is to say, that stones are exempt from metabolism?” Witnesses of the ‘lithic choreography’16 in Becoming Mineral are suspended in an aesthetic assemblage that resonates beyond demarcations of interiority and exteriority, in-between human and inhuman, before any splitting of geos and bios. The metabolizing rock has a “warping surface”, which distorts the “material imaginaries” of rock formations as monolithic concretions. The threedimensional rock at the heart of the image moves; audiences encounter something inhuman, in themselves, when approaching the rock that spirals in random rotational patterns, anchored to an invisible axis in the middle of the screen. We follow Berrigan’s moving image and resonate with her words, “in alliance, we move together, we mineralise”. The seemingly inert minerals which are ingested into the body, complicates, as Elizabeth Povinelli argues, the ‘geontopowers’ of the dualistic dynamics between Life and Non-Life, according to Western metaphysics and imaginaries. Invited in, the rock relays geometrical precision to the gaze that is fixed dead centre, between Life and Non-Life, holding the rock as it precariously swirls and loops in place. Its permeable, spongy texture further leads the gaze in-between its strata, into imaginaries that implicate witnesses of the rock within its formation and vice versa.
