The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin is a work of speculative theory that documents Pierre Jardin’s apprenticeship to stone, in Deleuze’s sense of apprenticeship of a process in which “to learn is first of all to consider a substance…as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted…. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood” (Deleuze, 4). Stone is a primordial substance, what Isamo Nogiuchi calls “our fundament” (in Paternosto, 181), the medium in which humans have evolved and lived. Consequently, it has a deep cultural history: as sculptor Jake Harvey observes, “The heritage of stone is an athenaeum containing a rich repository that, like the material itself, has accumulated over a vast timescale” (Stone, 9).