The Stories of Stones
What can we learn from our elders, the stones? The Finnish artist Elsa Salonen explores the unmoving life.
By Andrea Vetter
“Stories Told by Stones” – I casually see the announcement for the exhibition on my way through Berlin. I am electrified: here, right next to the large intersection and the shopping mall, the silent stories of the stones are to be told? I look forward to visiting the exhibition at the beginning of March together with the Finnish artist Elsa Salonen.
As we enter the rooms of the Schwartz Villa, an old manor house in the Berlin district of Steglitz, it is completely quiet. The windows are darkened. The city is outside; inside, we listen to the stories of the stones. “I am interested in the interface between scientific thinking and mystical dimensions,” says Elsa Salonen, who studied at the Berlin University of the Arts. Born in 1984 in Turku, Finland, she has lived in Berlin for several years. For the stone exhibition, she researched at the Finnish Literature Archive and spoke with geologists; she ground stones into pigments and invented a new painting technique. She is fascinated by the materiality of stones: “I consider stones to be our elders. They were here before us. They can tell us about the past”—and indeed, they do: Almost everything we know about past epochs on this planet has been preserved in stones. In many cultures, stones play a role as carriers of memory and wisdom. Elsa Salonen refers to her Finnish homeland, where people still make offerings to sacred stones: “I remember that as a child, I saw such stones while traveling with my family, next to which lay old bones.” She also recalls her own original animism as a child: “I had a stone that was like my friend. This theme of being with nature was always present.”
Peter Cornelius Mayer-Tasch also reflects on what this means in “The Stone as Brother” (see book reference, page 61): “The question that arises when thinking about our current relationship with stones is what we owe them—how we can thank them for what we owe them. It is a question of the dividing line between legitimate use and illegitimate abuse. It is a question of attitude. And it is a question of style.”
Crushed Essence into Pigments
The exhibition undoubtedly has style. It consists of two darkened rooms that approach the theme from opposing directions: In the first room, delicate drawings made with mineral pigments are painted on glass walls. Some look like maps of past continents, one resembles a fossil, and some display abstract forms. In the center stands a square table with stones on it, next to which the corresponding pigments are arranged. The foundation of reflection in this room is alchemy: exploring the essence of a stone. The idea of the alchemists was maximally abstract and frighteningly modern: The stone is torn from its surroundings, ground into powder, and chemically altered to reveal its essence—in purity, cleansed from its environment. “We must torture nature to learn enough from it,” wrote the scholar Francis Bacon in the 17th century.
In the other room, however, the stones can be viewed in their embedding: a ten-minute film presents typewritten protocols collected by the Finnish Literary Society between the 1920s and 1940s. In short, simple sentences, it records what people from the countryside shared about their belief in sacred stones. Interspersed are black-and-white photographs of these stones in forests and meadows, also from the archive of the literary society. The stones have notches carved by people, where water collects, said to have miraculous effects. The protocols recount customs from people’s childhood, such as offering forest berries to the stones in order to ask for a good reindeer hunt or a bountiful fish catch. The stones were seen as powerful, awe-inspiring beings. One particular statement touches me deeply: “The stones are also people; we just don’t see them,” says one of those recorded. This echoes what Ursula K. Le Guin wrote and what Donna Haraway picked up on—speaking of animal, plant, and mineral “people”—which reappears here unexpectedly from the mouth of a simple Finnish villager of the 1930s.
It is interesting that the aesthetic form of the two rooms serves as a counterpoint to the content: the embedding of very specific, personally known stones in the second room is visible only in a highly abstracted and doubly mediated way—through the old protocols projected as film images onto a white screen. The alchemical abstraction in the first room, on the other hand, generates a tangible physicality of the stones and stone pigments.
Tracing the Constant Change of Matter
Six years ago, Elsa Salonen began creating art with plants, animals, and minerals. Before that, she worked as a painter with industrial paints on Plexiglas. But then she could not shake the thought that everything loses its color when it dies. She tried to represent this with conventional methods, but it didn’t feel right: “It felt like an illustration of this fact,” not like an exploration. At that time, she spent several months as an artist-in-residence at Schloss Wiepersdorf, surrounded by meadows and fields. There she began experimenting with other materials. She read alchemical works because she wanted to learn how to extract the colorful essence from dying plants: “Since then, I have to invent a new technique for each work.” She produced plant colors, drew constellations with star dust made from ground meteorites, collected and dried 80 wild herbs, and drew their structures with ash from fox bones. A few months earlier, a friend of hers had died—she was tracing the constant change of matter: from a part of a human to a tree, to a fox, to a stone.
For a long time, she struggled with whether making art was the right path for her: Could she really be helpful to society this way? But now it feels right: “I believe if all people were a little more animistic, we wouldn’t have all these ecological crises. I want to contribute a small part to that.”
One of her upcoming projects will be a nomadic temple with art as well as lectures and workshops on the relationship between human and non-human beings. She is planning this together with British scholar Graham Harvey, who studies animism. The temple could wander from the forest into the city and back to the countryside, thus connecting the different spheres.
I thank Elsa for the tour. There is still much to learn from our grandmothers, the stones.
