In response to her installation My Contact Aureoles, Sophie Seita’s lecture performance Reading the Rock explores poetic and geophilosophical questions about time, embedded histories, and queer intimacy. It bends into and around different body-and rock-formations—responding to the metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rocks in the Big Bend National Park on the border between West Texas and Mexico.

The performance harnesses other materials and voices to tease out the complex from the simple and vice versa, all pivoting around some questions that animate her work in the show: How can a work hold a moment, translate it, make it tangible and yet remain ultimately unknowable? Or more simply: How can I experience this enough?

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34476