Cynthia Montier & Ophélie Naessens, 2026
A few introductory words
Us and the pebbles
Since 2019, we have been working together as a duo of artist-researchers and facilitators. At the intersection of our ritual, pedagogical, and social practices, we explore the notions of ritual pedagogies and mineral socialities through co-creative and socially engaged artistic forms. Together, we imagine and experiment with participatory frameworks that intimately intertwine stones, spiritualities, and forms of resistance from an anthropological, artistic, and feminist perspective.
Through documentary, procedural, and performative forms, we create collective experiences based on the transmission of knowledge (particularly intuitive or affective forms of knowledge), stone rituals and narratives, viewed through the lens of social and mineral movements. Through lapidary images, objects, narratives, and lithic gestures (placing, throwing, burying, lifting, etc.) emerging from our investigations, we seek to bring forth new imaginaries as potential tools for mediation and transmission.
We develop methodologies based on narrative, geological, and intuitive research protocols around a given territory, its inhabitants, its objects, and its affects.
Our shared interest in stones, rocks, minerals, and other pebbles was the starting point of our friendship as well as our artistic collaboration. We consider stones both as subjects engaged in ritual and spiritual practices, extensively described by anthropologists, and, increasingly today, as eco-political subjects confronted with predatory relationships to the Earth and its communities (extraction, mining, blasting, destruction of ecosystems, plundering of communities, etc.).
For us, stones are thus devices of communication, struggle, interpretation, affective expression, and collective memory, sometimes carrying particular forms of agency or significance. Since the dawn of humanity, stones have accompanied gestures and communities: magical rituals, divinatory practices, healing of body and soul, sacred processions, spiritual foundations, and acts of resistance.
From standing stones and megaliths to thrown paving stones and engraved messages, stones are both witnesses and actors in histories, uprisings, and transmissions across different periods and geopolitical territories. As subjects of stories, stones have played crucial roles in the construction of subjectivity since the emergence of humanity, particularly during periods of turbulence such as the one we are currently experiencing.
In an era marked by the separation between the living and the non-living, we seek to reinvest our relationships with stones through the lens of ritual.
Stones, rituals and resistances (from Utopiana to HEAD)
At the beginning of summer 2025, Marianne and Olivier invited us to imagine a workshop at HEAD, within the TRANS-forme master’s program. This invitation resonated with the work we were conducting at Utopiana: a creative and research project around rituals of burying and raising stones (anthropological, political, spiritual, and cultural), examined through their relationships with sacred and civic practices, care practices and political struggles, lands and communities, in conversation with philosopher Federico Luisetti (Nonhuman Subjects: An Ecology of Earth-Beings, 2023).
Through our own research, we encountered Federico’s thinking, and what particularly caught our attention was the idea of stones as storied subjects — as narrative subjects, subjects of histories — and their inscription within both ancient and contemporary struggles.
Through the work of Marisol de la Cadena, and accompanied by eco-transfeminist perspectives1 and approaches based on the rights of nature, mineral entities open up a field of sensitive relationships and alliances that allows us to think about our connections to soils, ecosystems, and collective bodies as ritual responsibilities, both genealogical and political.
These subjects exist from the moment they provoke disruptions and alternative distributions of space, time, and bodies, but also of the functions and positions usually assigned to human beings2 . Stones are animated — not in the same way as biological beings (plants or animals), but through their affective, ritual, and meaningful encounters with us, human beings.
They allow us to rethink our relationships with the “spirits of the Earth,”3 with what separates or connects visible and invisible worlds, living beings and non-living entities. They also enable us to imagine our relationship to time in a non-linear way (past/future, life/death), through a temporal thickness experienced in our rituals as thresholds.
Stones are therefore storied subjects: they tell stories of events that have occurred, sometimes leaving topographical traces (imprints, arrangements, holes, etc.) that make these events present. A stone may bear witness to a public and social use; it informs through time and transmits certain social issues belonging to a community.
The stone commemorates as much as it creates connections: it mediates between societies and their different ages, becoming a sign of transition and memory.
In myths, legends, and stories about stones, they move, dance, watch over, grow, and form circles. Although these beings often appear to us as quiet rocks, they continue to move through ongoing processes of subjectification4 .
«These stones planted in the earth live — peasants and shepherds say […] — they turn around on themselves, they dance, they bend, they drink ».
Fulvio Jesi, Il linguaggio delle pietre, Milan, Rizzoli, 1978.
[Fig.1 Ophélie Naessens & Cynthia Montier, in “Mineral Socialities”, in Labor A. (ed.), Giardini postnaturali e ecologie minerali [Postnatural Gardens and Mineral Ecologies], Muse, Trento, 2025.]
Thus, stones constitute, in a way, the history of the world: they are unsettling presences. Stones as narrative subjects are at the heart of our work: arranged, touched, manipulated, and spoken to within our performances, workshops, and artistic devices. They accompany us in exploring forms that we call “mineral societies.”5
« Stones persist and humans die; stones remain firm while animals wander. Rocks condense time into matter in a way that is forbidden to biological actors: their strata are an archive of the forces that decompose and recombine life; within their solid space, time becomes distorted, the rhythms of creation and destruction of organisms, and the zones of contact between individual bodies and the environment become porous. »
Luisetti Federico, Nonhuman Subjects, Cambridge University Press, 2023, p. 32.
Following these lines of research, we designed the workshop “Mineral Alliances” for the students of the TRANS-forme Master’s program. It proposed exploring forms of collective ritualization marked by a “trust in the reception of the forces of the living,”6 in order to imagine spaces-times of convergence between subjectivities, socialities, rituals, and terrestrial forces: zones of contact and genealogy between our bodies and mineral worlds.
Several questions guided this research:
What ecologies and alliances can we imagine with non-human entities, particularly invisible or mineral ones? What can they transmit to us or teach us about our relationships, our attachments or detachments, and our shared terrestrial conditions?
Through this three-day collective work, the aim was to open, together with the students, a space of dialogue and transmission — intuitive, political, and affective — with stones: not as inert objects, but as subjects of stories (presences, archives, companions).
Some reflective perspectives
Here, we use the term “ritual” to describe pedagogies re-centered around bodies and gestures, emotions and personal experience, as well as collective creation, within contexts of knowledge and skill transmission in artistic education.
We also connect these ritual pedagogies with group techniques emerging from transfeminist environments and from socially engaged or community-based practices.
Somatic stones: the importance of the body and collective gestures
In Sociology and Anthropology (1968), ethnologist Marcel Mauss describes ritual as a set of effective traditional acts, performed according to a regulated sequence of gestures and words, transmitted through tradition. The emphasis is placed on the embodiment of ritual through a series of formalized gestures.
Yet, all too often in artistic education, particularly within theoretical courses, we — students and teachers alike — tend to forget that we also have bodies. In lecture halls or workshops, it is easy to observe a lack of consideration for the body within learning situations.
Conversely, certain approaches borrowed from ritual practices invite us to (re)introduce the body into educational contexts.
Starhawk reminds us that rituals can be a way of strengthening collective power. According to the feminist anti-militarist author7 , they are:
« moments of connection where we can clarify shared visions, move through periods of mourning, or celebrate victories together. Moments that help us connect with one another and inhabit our territories, and yet they are feared by some activists. This fear comes from anxieties about cults and religion, irrational behaviors, the unknown… But ritual is far older than any organized religion, and even animals have developed them. Perhaps this fear of rituals is based more on the anxiety of letting go of the individualized liberal self, the fear of our capacity to merge into a collective effervescence where the self, the other, the body, and the world become one. Perhaps it reveals the fear of being truly connected, and therefore the fear of being truly free. »
Starhawk, Réveiller l’obscur : Femmes, magie et politique, Paris, Cambourakis 2015, p. 43.
For example, walking is a practice present in many sacred and secular rituals (processions, parades, demonstrations, etc.). Within pedagogical spaces and times (workshops, seminars, but also theoretical courses), we propose collective walking exercises inspired by ritual practices, drawing on contemporary artists whose work engages with questions of the moving body, ritual, wandering, and walking protocols (Ami Skånberg, Johanna Rocard, Amalia Pica, Kateřina Šedá, etc.).
Beyond allowing participants to renew their perception of everyday territories through an artistic perspective, these workshops aim to introduce somatic practices at the heart of teaching and working environments, as well as to reconnect bodies with creative processes.
These approaches intersect with perspectives of sensitive pedagogy, grounded in learners’ bodily experiences.
Furthermore, these exercises seek to experiment with a different relationship to knowledge, one rooted in bodily postures and modes of awareness of others’ presence8 .
Thinking of ritual as a pedagogical form — that is, as a way of collectively apprehending reality — also echoes the idea developed by performance artist and educator Suzanne Lacy, according to whom art can serve as a channel for empathy.
This also resonates with certain feminist group practices developed in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s (Libreria delle donne di Milano, Rivolta Femminile) or proposed by Alex Martinis Roe (The Practice of Listening)9 .
The movement of bodies is encouraged through collective experience, awareness of oneself and others. It also allows participants to move away from the static posture conditioned by traditional mechanisms of knowledge transmission and reception.
No more desks, podiums, or face-to-face arrangements, but bodies together, in presence.
Walking becomes both a tool for reflection and a tool for creation.
Other somatic practices can also be introduced into learning situations (Isabelle Ginot, Mabel Elsworth Todd, Alex Martinis Roe), particularly by mobilizing bodily approaches aimed at developing students’ awareness of their own bodies (breathing, slowness, attention, quality of movement, internal perception, etc.), with the aim of improving the educational experience.
Ritual pedagogy can also be understood as artistic performance in action.
In Performing Pedagogy: Toward an Art of Politics (1999), Charles R. Garoian already defended the idea of a pedagogy not solely based on the transmission of information, but rather conceived as an artistic performance.
The act of teaching should therefore be understood as a performative act intertwining body, gestures, and voice.
For choreographer and educator Anna Halprin (Mouvements de vie, 2009), ritual is an embodied learning process.
According to the artist, learning occurs above all through the body, and ritual pedagogy relies on open scores that organize and propose simple actions (walking, breathing, touching, etc.), enabling participants to access knowledge through experience rather than through verbal transmission alone.
The ritual is lived through the bodies of the learners.
On the importance of emotions and personal stories
In rituals understood from an anthropological perspective, the collective sharing of words and stories is an essential element. From this perspective, ritual pedagogies maintain, for us, a close relationship with feminist pedagogies, at the heart of which care — understood as attention to others (Sandra Laugier), to their words and emotions — is fundamental. Early feminist pedagogies (Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Terry Wolverton, bell hooks, Suzanne Lacy, Doris Stauffer, etc.) introduced into practices of transmission a consideration for affects and personal narratives. We also find this attention in numerous proposals for feminist collective practices: autohistoria-teoría (Gloria Anzaldúa), radical listening (Carol Gilligan), consciousness-raising (Carla Lonzi).
The experience of speech is lived through collective experience, by means of storytelling exercises, attentive listening, and awareness of oneself within the group.
These contributions make it possible to examine relations of domination, vulnerabilities, and invisibilities; to advocate for a reduction of hierarchies, for the absence of opposition between theory and practice, between the personal and the political, as well as for a relationship between teachers and students based on collaboration and listening. More recently, in a publication by the TRANS Master’s programme, the Microsillons Collective claims “a pedagogy that they want to be feminist (challenging binary oppositions between theory and practice, personal and political, and encouraging collective thinking).”10 In the book La Part affective, Sophie Orlando (Villa Arson) explains how contemporary pedagogical relationships are above all based on the circulation of affects, through an “articulation between intimacy and politics [which] makes possible the writing of a renewed narrative of art.”11
Concretely, within our pedagogical formats, this perspective can take the form of introducing opening sequences based on the transmission of personal stories and memories (real or fictional) as a creative impulse. This introduction aims to create small communities of encounter and exchange among students, and to initiate practice within a more intimate and convivial framework. Sharing stories also helps reduce apprehensions before moving into practice, bringing together individual perspectives, personal viewpoints, and possibilities of identification.
Placing personal narratives at the centre of exchanges also questions the hierarchies of knowledge within artistic education between academic knowledge and popular knowledge. It allows us to highlight forms of knowledge transmission based on experience and personal lived realities, as well as to revalue emotions and intuition over rationality. Giving a central place to emotions and lived experiences within pedagogy makes it possible to use them as a driving force for an embodied and sensitive artistic practice.
Ritual pedagogies and co-creation
In its various secular forms, ritual is fundamentally understood as a practice that is experienced and transmitted collectively; a shared space-time to inhabit together. Unlike religious rituals12 , rituals within artistic and activist contexts are not fixed, but fluid, and can be co-created by the group. They are thus conceived as forms that can exist within a non-linear temporality, that is, one in which stories can find their place without being constrained by predefined limits of time or space. The role of co-creation is fundamental in this perspective, as it encourages students to take responsibility for the contents (theoretical, referential, practical) of their learning processes13 .
« Ritual is an act of responsibility that gives meaning. And as the English word respons-ability clearly expresses, it involves acquiring the possibility of responding ».
Jean Duvignaud, Fêtes et civilisations, Arles, Actes Sud, 1991, p. ?.
Furthermore, ritual pedagogies can be considered tools for personal and collective transformation. In participatory artistic practices, as experienced through ritual performances, the idea of shared responsibility is reinvested in the creative process, and therefore in the possibility of a non-hierarchical relationship with others, founded on the sharing of knowledge. Rather than transmitting content vertically, the aim is to accompany participants in discovering their own expertise and interests, and to collectively bring forth possibilities.
Ritual pedagogies therefore invite teachers, practitioners, and students to question together the construction of learning spaces and times that are more inclusive, fluid, and co-created14 .
Collective dynamics and ethical positions: relationships within shared creation
This reflexive practice of ritual pedagogies is situated within the continuity of our experiences and the tools we develop in pedagogical, social, artistic, and activist contexts (universities, CFPI, ESEIS, day-care centres, neighbourhood associations in priority areas, etc.). In these contexts, we explore the implementation of ritual pedagogical forms outside artistic contexts, and we ask ourselves:
What dynamics need to be addressed within these fields? How can shared creation be combined with social work, care, and mediation? What forms of address and relationships should be established?
The question is to reflect, from the perspective of the collective body — the group — on tools for collective creation (intervention, laboratory, circle, collective, coven) and on shared artistic experiences. We attach particular importance to awareness of the ethical and emotional dimensions of the positions adopted (especially that of the artist-facilitator).
Within these engaged approaches, which involve the participation of people from different social backgrounds, it is essential for us to remain attentive to mechanisms of authority and power dynamics that may emerge within co-creative processes.
Our methodological foundations and tools come from social anthropology and popular education, ritual and community practices, performative and activist practices, co-creation and social work, practices of care and relationality, feminist knowledge, as well as intuitive, somatic, and divinatory forms of knowledge.
Through our interventions, ritual pedagogy opens a space attentive to places of vulnerability, in which ritualities and socialities become a powerful prism: gestures that bring people together.
Some practical pathways
The workshop “Mineral Alliances” took place in September 2025 at HEAD. It unfolded through a series of collective experiments: walks, narratives, gestures, and other practices. Together, we explored the stone — as a relational subject (geocorps) and as a storied-subject — simultaneously as matter, memory, critical tool, and political companion, drawing upon a genealogy of sensitive, intuitive, and transversal approaches developed through our research (storytelling, mineral narratives, stone walking, affective archives, somatic exercises, genealogy of lithic gestures, etc.).
Here we retrace some of these approaches and entry points.
Stone walks
Walking together in pairs, guided by an intention and following an intuitive route.
Encountering one’s companion stone.
Stone stories
Sharing stories.
A story (of care, protection, courage, accomplishment).
A story involving a mineral element (a hike, a swim, an ascent, a demonstration, a magical event, etc.).
Stones that hunger (O.) “In the Andes, stones called illa are considered essential to livestock breeding. Most often, it is their zoomorphic appearance that identifies them as illa, with the most sought-after being those shaped like bulls (waka).When a shepherd encounters such a stone and it is small in size, they take it back to their land. They dig a hole and place the stone there so that the animal figure faces the direction where the sun rises. When there are several, they arrange them in a row. The shepherd is then responsible for raising these stones (uyway in Quechua; criar in Spanish), feeding them, and caring for them. For shepherds, these stones are hungry and require attention.”
Lightning stones (C.)“The story I would like to share concerns the discovery by archaeologists at the entrance of the Roman villa of Bernex of a lithic inscription dedicated to lightning, accompanied by a Neolithic stone axe whose origin was attributed in Antiquity to a lightning strike.This discovery is probably connected to a ritual, according to archaeologists. The cult of lightning is thought to have Etruscan origins and implies the belief that any place struck by this phenomenon becomes sacred and requires a burial ritual for the struck objects; the site remains marked by a dedication.At Bernex, the interpretation of such a discovery suggests three possibilities: either it was important to indicate a place actually struck by lightning; or it marked the place where the Neolithic axe was found, proving a previous lightning strike; or finally, it was intended to protect the site from another lightning strike.”
Stone bibliomancy
Building a shared corpus.
Creating zones of contact (belongings, attachments, kinships).
Weaving connections and carrying stories.
From mystical writing practices to feminist reading circles.
Love libraries — desire libraries — Archives of Feelings (Ann Cvetkovich) — autohistories (Gloria Anzaldúa).
Warm-up — Stone Pilates
Physical connection with one’s stone.
Discovering it, sensing it, approaching it, becoming familiar with it through the body.
Towards a collective body ritual
Collective experiments in moving the body through space.
Moving in procession, lying down, massaging, wandering, barricading oneself, stone gang…
Ritual stone gestures
Experimenting with ritual gestures involving stones, experimenting with bodily postures.
Washing, healing, passing, fumigating, wrapping, raising, engraving, burying, throwing, immersing, carrying, laying to rest…
Ritual
Writing a collective ritual — a score.
Formulating a collective intention.
Carrying out the ritual together in public space.