Quarry Sonnets: Artistic Methodologies in More-than-Human Reasoning

The article proposes a posthumanist, site-led mode of reasoning in which geological, ecological, climatic, and human forces participate in shaping artistic practice. It draws on Quarry Sonnets, a nine-day, practice-led field project at the Vale de Meios limestone quarry in Portugal’s Serras de Aire e Candeeiros Natural Park in late November 2022, involving forty-five participants from six European art schools. Treating art practice as a way of knowing, the project convened open, revisable ways of working—walking, listening, iterative making, and collective reflection—so that the quarry’s tempos, weather, fossils, and working traces could co-author inquiry. Methodologies were held lightly and adjusted in practice, with decisions led by what the site made possible on a given day rather than preset outcomes. Two orienting commitments—attunement and composting knowledge—held diverse practices and partial understandings in contact without forcing consensus. The article’s contribution is to foreground artistic practice as a way of organizing environmental research by expanding who participates and what counts as evidence, while refusing closure into templates, solutions, or toolkits. In this register, research proceeds with the quarry and its more-than-human relations as a co-author that sets pace and constraint, keeping political and ecological questions active without resolving them in advance.