A Stone Flies Up Over the Mountains (EN+NL) is a labyrinthine hybrid book that can be read and viewed in different ways, linearly or jumping between pages.
The synergy between the diverse texts and images found in its pages previously led to the creation of our stage performances SUN-SET (2020) and Indoor Weather (2021). Photographs, sketches and drawings from those two performances are used, interfering with the material of other artists.
In this book we bring together scifi author Jeff VanderMeer, performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson, poet Inger Christensen, experimental film pioneer Stan Brakhage, and philosopher Patricia de Martelaere, among others. Laura Van Severen made the majority of the photographs.
PROLOGOS, a massive poem by Inger Christensen, forms the backbone of the whole. It runs once in Dutch, once in English, toward the center of the book. Two large clusters of text and image are built around SUN-SET and Indoor Weather. They mirror each other and finally flow into each other.
With the collection det (‘it’), from which PROLOGOS originates, Inger Christensen undertook an ambitious attempt to capture ‘all that is’ in one book. The approach of SUN-SET and Indoor Weather echoes that ambition. SUN-SET revolves around ‘cosmogony’: stories and explanatory models for the creation of a world. Indoor Weather, in turn, focuses on ‘cosmology’, which tells the structure and interconnectedness of all things in a world.
The ground beneath our feet often turns out to be less solid than we think.
