21st century education
An Invitation to Throw Stones

An Invitation to Throw Stones

An Invitation to Throw Stones
Stone Throwing North Holland

Dear PBResearcher,

I’d really like to extend you An Invitation to Throw Stones

An Invitation to Throw Stones seeks to invite others to participate in an act of minor adjustment to a natural composition by accepting a stone that has been selected from another part of a beach and throwing it into the sea*, discussing the event with the participant. Of course, on a geographical scale, these tiny interventions affect changes that are barely perceptible but I find it interesting to imagine a greatly magnified aerial view of the beach before and subtly altered after the project has been performed (and before the sea makes its erasure and posits a new arrangement). I’m interested in both the action itself and the result of the action in aggregate – the change produced by all those tiny movements in summation. I also like the idea that the next destination of the thrown stone remains a mystery…

The act of throwing is significant as the throw demands a different attitude, a different posture and co-ordination of muscles than simply placing or putting a stone in another location to produce the same visual results. I have thrown stones competitively. I have thrown stones in anger. I have thrown stones for fun. Carrying out this action on Sunday, I discussed the emotional content of throwing with several of the participants and enjoyed observing how they then launched their stone into the sea.

For the sake of poetry, I refer to all “missiles” in this text as stones although the strand we visited was entirely stone-free! However, there were lots of shells, so we shifted the object of the invitation to suit the environment. We walked along a stretch of strand choosing shells from different points – I found the razor-clam shells worked really well as they were easiest to write upon. On one side of each shell we wrote the title of the action in Dutch: Een uitnodiging om stenen te gooien and on the underside, Een Relatie Kunst Project (which was my rough translation of “A relational art project”).

I hope you will join us in this action, and if you do and you fancy sharing a document of your stone-throwing engagement, so much the merrier! I will post received documentation in my Studio West studio space to be enjoyed by a wider community 🙂 I will send you a link when your document is added.

Here are some links to a summary video document and photographic recording of our experience of the activity:

Summary Video: An Invitation to Throw Stones
Photographic documentation: An Invitation to Throw Stones

Thank you so much for giving this your time. I hope you will throw a stone in the spirit of this project (though, preferably not within range of glasshouses! 😉
— Ciara.

  • The shores of lakes, rivers, streams are equally acceptable for inlanders 😉

How can MU help you?