The fossil sits in Dresden, its spongy travertine mass belying the pleated forms, the inexhaustible archivolts, flutes and pilasters that cleave the fluid stone. They trace the condensing and expanding vibrations, echoes of a respiration which inaugurate a human-vegetal-mineral allyship: a potential of shared becoming in a breath that mobilises homologies between species. This is breath locked in stone and captured in a body, like an embryonic respiration, a breathing of no breath that seizes the air, weaves spirals through flocks of infinite tiny parts. The perceptive organs that are everywhere, swarming, vibrating, the air shapes, rounding off the angles, creating asymmetrical masses, unlimited potentialities, irregularities held in bulk. The movement is not illusion. The creaturely mass vibrates the marrow and sounds the bones, eluding a petrified unrest.
A collective of breath builds gardens of infinitely diverging, interweaving forked paths, straight edges that curve, points that echo, underside opposes overside, pleat-as-tone, fold-as-release: respiration unfolds, infinite tiny folds expand into greater folds in a disharmonic chord that sound irresolvable accords. Intoxicating, blurred, a baroque abundance of condensing pleats unfurling into a chromatic concertation. They converge, infinitely, and now, resisting mutable mineral history. The encounter between incompossible but parallel breaths, chiming in asymmetrical harmonics, repeat the pleats of carbon that fold into planet, that shadows the folds of the soul, which fold into world. They shape soft and fluid consciousness, hydrate and bevel off the brittle edges, the singular units of perception that distribute specific reflections and discrete totalities, stuttering chords chiming together to produce infinite virtualities. The fluttering patterns in the nervous system are those potentialities, the hums that hack the one and the only closure of death, resist ‘holding fast to the ruins’, free themselves from the flattening embrace of mass. The perceptions seek to smash the stone into specks, grab, reassure and spiritualise it.
Unfurl the teemings and the seethings that exceed the frame, exceed species into spaces of kindness, kinship through a breathing without breathing, a Baroque dance of elaborate and exaggerated style that outruns the ‘constant disquiet (of progress) that knows no development’. Everything is cascading relays, the tense repose of a contrapuntal dance, as a supremely natural movement-without-nature notated in a determined style of uncultured thought, a ‘sprezzatura’, into a restrained abandon.