Unearthing Frequencies - Stone Stories

Things aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Put your ear to the ground, can you tune in and hear the stones speak? What stories do they tell?

Unearthing Frequencies - Stone Stories takes you on a participatory headphonic walk through Stonefields, an ongoing housing development in a former quarry beside Maungarei.

On the surface, a 21st century community is evolving, following a master plan for an “urban village”. But just four decades ago this was the largest aggregate quarry in Aotearoa. What was here before that? And what lived and lithic stories have been lost to productivity and progress? Join us as we see how far back can we go into the history of this site, through the entanglement of human time and geological time.

This ambulatory, site-based work has been formed around the bones of a cyberfeminist reworking of the myth Echo created in the early isolation of COVID-19 as an exchange between the UK and Aotearoa. This work responds to the lands we inhabit and the stories that reverberate from these sites, our ancestral bones. Standing in the old Mt Wellington Quarry we draw the connection between the stone buried deep in the substrata and our online technologies as they connect us across space and site.

This walk will be experienced via supplied headphones and involves an hour of gentle walking with some stairs and uneven terrain.

There will be a wheel-accessible performance and fully masked event on Saturday 17 September at 2pm.

We will follow the public health guidelines for Covid-19.

Created by Molly Mullen and Becca Wood.

With support from Melissa Laing, Kat Thomas, Alejandra Jaramillo Arostizabal and Tamati Patuwai.

UK Collaborators Dinah Mullen, Jemima Yong, Stephanie Kempson and Georgina Bednar.