I Build My Language with Rocks

"If I were to make a map of my territory it would be a song."¹

I Build My Language With Rocks is an ongoing artistic research process that began in 2022 within the Aeolian volcanic archipelago. The process emerges as an imaginative search for ways to attune to the planet’s grain—to listen to the earthly pulses shaping what matters.

In resonance with Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking,² this process listens with basaltic formations and their rhythmic intensities; the wide breaths, tremorous eruptions, and slow dissolutions that surge from within the earth’s core. To conceive these processes as language lies not in metaphor but in their capacity to inscribe transformation and depth—material, temporal, affective.

What happens when listening begins beneath hearing, in the thickness of vibration, where sound has not yet become sound? How does silence carry itself when it becomes substance—dense and slow enough to echo? What does it mean to tune to the tempo and grammar of rocks—to align with durations that move too gradually for the ear, yet sediment the very grounds of resonance?

From this questioning emerges Lithoaurality: a mode of listening that precedes the audible, yet tunes to vibration, with which it opens a modality of relation. It drifts through subsoil and subconscious, keeping contact without capture—not through inability, but through a non-extractive attunement that allows what it meets to remain partially unknowable—and listening for what endures below perception—the dreamlike, the mineral, the infra.

Lithoaurality binds lithos (Greek for “rock”) with the aural (listening as vibration-address) and aura (the rock’s soul-breath: retained heat, salt bloom, ash fines, humidity, sulfur trace). It attends to matter’s viscosity and slow liquidity, sculpted by pressure, temperature, and time—forms that perform solidity only long enough to disguise their ongoing metamorphoses.

Lithoaural listening attunes to these ever-evolving contours of matter that hold molten memory and anticipate their own weathering, staying with the gradients where vibration and substance enact one another. It gestures toward a continuous composition in which no form—whether material, sensorial, or affective—remains fixed, but drifts through successive states of becoming, carved by the same pressure and fire that shape the planet itself.

This text morphs archipelagically, shifting through fragments, dreams, and gestures that trace the evolving textures of lithoaurality. Its islands—Oneiric, Vibration, Opacity, Transmission, and Tempo—are qualities through which lithoaurality thickens, folds, and transforms. Through them, three iterations of I Build My Language with Rocks—Ash Rain, Seismic Diaries, and Tephra—surface as currents within a shared field of vibration, each inflecting lithoaurality through sound, text, and gesture.

1. Oneiric

​​Underneath: a low murmur held in stone,

time pulsing under skin.

Lava exhaled—minerals in a churn—

cooling to porous quiet, grounded,

chaos remembered in the grain.

Stromboli, Iddu: brief constellations of basalt,

a frost-lit new-moon vault,

the sea records time in a slow sway.

Dreaming with Iddu, Stromboli’s volcanic being, opens a first thread—a descent into a depth where vibration circulates as warmth, pulse, drift, and asks: where does the subterranean become subconscious?

Infra-pulses and minor tremors compose a field in which the ear falters and the body listens in its place. The dream does not illustrate; it transmits through vibration as language and delay as syntax. To listen through the oneiric is to stay with the misty registers of the earth’s breathing—the infrasounds of minerals, the humidity of silence, the murmurs that move between rock, air, and skin.

Lithoaurality inhabits the porous seam where the material and the oneiric correspond, moving through the continuities between waking and dreaming and holding their shared vibration in suspension. In many communities, dreams are shared at dawn—night’s messages returning to guide the day. Ailton Krenak urges us to recover our collective capacity to dream as a way to imagine and practice other ways of becoming.³ Dreaming then is a practice that responds to what the stone remembers; the day learns to bear it in its repertoires.

The oneiric evokes a slow and viscous listening: before basalt cools, mud oozes and exceeds its form; after, it cracks before it can be named. Before condensation writes across black glass, ash annotates what speech cannot hold. The island resonates through porous bodies, through half-remembered frequencies that never entirely wake.

In the exchange between subsoil and subconscious, lithoaurality asks: can dreaming itself be an ecological practice of listening—one that senses through the earth’s own unconscious?

Night: wind-rain, volumetric waves metamorphose into basalt rocks.
The storm blends with the volcano’s snores, conversing with the abrupt sway.

Before the dawn, black mud transmutes into the thicker-than-thick air.
The island wakes, once again re-sculpted by the quakes–black sand and stones spilling through the streets.

Vibration

Where dream loosens sense, vibration begins to sculpt it anew. The field thickens: strain, quiver, and flow.⁴ Lithoaurality moves through the frictions of force, where pressure, abrasion, collision, and yield coexist as textures of relation. Vibration composes sense through thresholds of warmth, resonance, tactility, and magnetism that range from the barely perceptible to the most eruptive. It enacts correspondence across geological, corporeal, affective, and atmospheric scales, binding what seems separate through shared instability.

In Ash Rain (2022–), a mesh of cords, fragments of stone, and faint infrasonic breaths suspend in air—each element carrying tension from another. The composition listens through its own structure; every knot is a node of pressure, every thread a passage for resonance. A tremor in one corner ripples through the weave in interdependent dynamism.

To attend to vibration is to remain within modulation—where cause and effect lose sequence, where sensing and sensed fold into one another through the body’s own resonance. The field of relation is not backdrop but co-composer; basalt, too, carries its resonances forward—the tremor of its cooling, the slow magnetism of minerals aligning as the rock condenses. This stillness, a tension held in suspension, sustains the world in motion.

What if mapping were made of tremors instead of lines?

Opacity

Lithoaurality clouds. In thickness, it folds over itself, resisting the demand to resolve. It stays with density, close to what wavers, and with what withholds translation. Opacity does not conceal: it sustains. It lets relation persist without the violence of full comprehension.⁴ To listen through opacity is to suspend the extractive impulse that insists everything must be heard, must be known. Some forms of listening carry within them a will to master—to turn vibration into evidence, resonance into resource.

An opaque listening withdraws from that appetite and instead inhabits the unresolved as a condition of attention. Not-knowing becomes a gesture of care, an ethics of holding open through which sound and world retain their texture.

Opacity also unsettles normative assumptions about perception. Following insights from disability studies, listening expands from the ability to hear toward distributed sensing—across bodies, practices, and proximities; across technological, gestural, and affective registers. To listen, then, is not exclusively to process sound but to inhabit relation through multiple modalities. Opacity marks the moment when perception does not consolidate into a single trajectory but diffuses into a field—when sensing moves sideways rather than forward, arriving as contour rather than outline, as murmured presence rather than decipherable form. In this dispersed terrain, the sonic is less a signal than a milieu: a mutable surround where relation is felt before it is named, where resonance exceeds the architectures that seek to stabilize it.

The fantasy of transparency—of the all-hearing, all-seeing ear—belongs to a colonial habit of thought that seeks to master through clarification, turning the planet into legible matter and relation into data. This appetite for total audibility mirrors extractive and assimilatory logics: to make the world available by forcing it to reveal itself. Yet the inaudible, the delayed, the misheard are not shortcomings of perception; they are intervals where the world resists being folded into capture. These zones of partiality are not voids but pressures—sites where sensing refuses domination and where meaning circulates without settling.

To listen with opacity is to dwell inside this pressure, where relation stays mobile and care takes the form of duration rather than possession. It asks for a listening that holds open instead of holding on, a listening that meets the world at the pace it offers. Rather than extracting clarity, opaque listening moves with the grain of uncertainty, remaining attentive to what trembles, withdraws, or arrives obliquely. It is a practice of patience in the presence of what cannot or should not be made fully available.

What if listening were less a pursuit of revelation than a practice of tending? What if the most attentive gesture were the one that keeps something unresolved—so that what exceeds us can continue to breathe, and what we care for can persist without being claimed?

Transmission

What travels through opacity does not vanish—it diffracts. As vibration moves, it bends to the densities it encounters, reshaping and being reshaped in return. A transmissive listening participates in an ecology of mediation that exceeds any single practice, technology, or device.

Signals drift through atmospheres and magnetic fields, through minerals conducting low frequencies, through antennas, cables, bones, membranes, and cells. As they move, vibrations modulate, redefined by the materials and bodies that receive and reemit them. Delay becomes a texture of relation: interference, its continuity.

Salvo’s father arrived in the ’70s, before electricity

he ran the radio; women sent messages and songs to husbands at sea or on construction,

four-hour tapes running through the night.

The field of transmission rejects purity and is instead enacted through assemblages of hybrid co-conductors—technologies, minerals, affects, and atmospheres. Seismic Diaries (2024) embodies these transmissive qualities: infrasonic murmurs sensed through geophones oscillate across distance, intermittently joined by conversations, live performances, and the incidental sounds of Stromboli‘s surface life. Beyond a message, what unfolds is a shared condition—vibration relayed through pressure, weather, and delay, co-articulating an ecology of mediation that endures precisely through transduction and dispersal.

What moves between signals is not loss but continuity—an entangled persistence through which vibration finds hosts, durations, and forms of attention still coming into resonance. If vibration leaves its trace in every medium it crosses, how might these inscriptions compose a memory of their own—an archive of ecological correspondences written in drift, delay, and hum?

Tempo

To listen lithoaurally is not to follow time but to move within its viscosities—to attend to vibration as a slow carrier of duration, gathering sediment as it travels. In this register, listening is not punctual but persistent, stretched across scales of decay and renewal. In the infrasonic, temporality folds: a second bears the memory of pressure; a tremor recalls epochs.

During those five days of Seismic Diaries (2024), the hum of Stromboli offered a temporal gesture: listening as endurance. Duration ceased to be a measure and became a shared rhythm—between human and volcanic breath, between transmission and decay. Through this extended resonance, lithoaurality tuns to the earth’s own tempos—slow, recursive, unresolved.

To listen thus is to inhabit territories as temporalities. The island is not a bounded surface but a modulation of durations, overlapping and eroding each other. Territory becomes process: pressure, latency, recurrence. To dwell within such times is to recognize that what we call land is the encounter of unfolding rhythms.

Time rounds the edges to sand

wind lifts each grain—shape and memory on the move.

stone upon stone becomes circulation—

a geological bloodstream

Duration unsettles the linear pulse of measure. It gathers strata of resonance—silences and after-sounds that never fully align. Listening slows into sediment; perception thickens into layers. This temporal attention is not passive but sustained: a form of care extended through time.

The slow vibration of stone, the echo held in air, the pause before a return—all speak of a world composing itself in intervals longer than those we inhabit. Time then, becomes also a medium. To listen lithoaurally is to remain inside this weathering of time, where measure gives way to metamorphosis and endurance becomes relation.

Salvo laughs at long-term plans; here, every second is being grateful to be alive.

Tephra, or trembling with the trouble

What remains after vibration settles is not silence but residue. Tephra names this remainder: the ash that travels farther than sound, settling unevenly across bodies and terrains. It is what stays when listening withdraws—a dispersed archive.

People shovel their houses; some could be swept away.
We follow the mud’s path: cracks higher up, striations of wind, water, lava…
a goat grunts, a distress call flickers through the phone.
Walking with the volcano is always a little tense.

Lithoaurality listens within this living archive, where vibration slows into matter and tremblement becomes an attunement to instability as intervals that prevent relation from hardening into form. It endures through motion: with pressure, with fracture, with the unsteady ground that sustains connection.

“Je bâtis à roches mon langage”⁵ crafts this, reminds us Édouard Glissant. It builds with resistant matter, letting resistance slow the sentence so it does not outrun the place that composes it. When the world—geologic, social, historical—shakes, the ear must tremble too; otherwise, it stiffens around what fits capture. Lithoaurality keeps the tremor as ground, sustaining relation without fixing it, keeping listening porous and breathing.

To build a language with rocks is to engage with what exceeds comprehension—to attune to slow, thick, infrasonic registers where creation and erosion coincide. It is to recognize aurality as a medium of planetary composition, where every tremor marks both relation and change.

Tephra gathers these remains not as conclusion but as continuation. The residue of listening—dust, hum, static—becomes ground for future attunement. In these dispersed traces, lithoaurality finds its ethics: a listening that resists possession, remaining porous to the world’s ongoing reconfiguration.

Perhaps this is what it means to build a language with rocks: to speak with what persists beyond clarity, to learn from what endures in fragments. In the intervals of these islands, listening holds apertures of composition—of returning, once more, to the map as song, as offering, as alive cartography of tremors and affects.

Immersed in the sunset, Iduu stains the clouds

red