When in doubt, ask the stone / Im Zweifel, frag den Stein

A site-specific, time-based project for the Festival of Future Nows

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2025

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This project was created in collaboration with Dr. Kat Heimann, an interdisciplinary scholar at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a background in philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and pedagogy. It builds on landscape architect Ram Eisenberg's ‘Stone Gardening’ exercise and is made possible by the larger collaboration Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), which is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation.

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Festival program description:

Even humble objects have the power to frame and hold space for attention. Our interactions with materials and their relations shape situations that are inherently embodied. If we ask ourselves good questions during these interactions, they can provide information about our felt experience of a space, such as a museum: our expectations, sense of agency, social norms, implicit permissions, creative stakes, and aesthetic sensibilities. In this exercise, small groups of participants will be invited to sit together at tables and will be prompted to engage with a variety of stones. We wonder, how can this experiment change the space, and how can the space change the experiment? For answers, we’ll consult the stones.​

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These exercises are accompanied by Sounds for Stone-Sensing and Sounds for Lithic-Belonging. The stones used in the Stone-Sensing exercise were sourced from the streets of Berlin and Aarhus, as well as Yoko Ono's Cleaning Piece (1996), which was recently installed at the Neue Nationalgalerie. After participating in our Stone-Sensing exercise, visitors were gifted a 'kit' to take with them. The kits are contained in simple satchels that nod to Ursula K. Le Guin's essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction' (1986).

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Professional photo documentation soon to come!