How to Turn to Stone

A play that behaves like a stone: what would that look like? What form would a 'mineral' representation take? What if we try to imitate what is never born, never will grow and never dies?

In How to Turn to Stone, stones, as 'non-living' things, are models for a different kind of resistance. Manuela Infante brings pieces of eroded stories together. The fragments become landscapes and she stacks those landscapes like geological rock layers – using looping and sound landscaping. This creates a 'mineral' representation telling you something about what is written in stones, and what stones have written in us.

In a world where notions of growth, progress and development are central to political and economic rhetoric, stones can shed critical light on how the notion of life – and the living – functions as a form of bio-normatisation: LIFE as a norm leading to oppression and exploitation. How to Turn to Stone zooms in on the similarity between working bodies and geological formations, and their shared history of extraction and depletion. We too are made of stone and can be mined.

• Manuela Infante is a Chilean author and theatre maker who tours worldwide and has previously performed in Brussels (KVS) with Estado Vegetal and Metamorphoses. In her work, she investigates the boundaries between the humane and the non-human, only then to dissolve them. During the Próximamente festival, Manuela Infante also stages her previous work Metamorphoses, co-directed by Michael De Cock, at KVS.