LEARNING FROM THE STONE

(work in progress)

Barbizon, Fontainebleau forest/ France

2020 to 2025

Artist Statement — Learning from the Stone

This series was born from a rupture.
In 2020, during the months of confinement in Madrid, I photographed healthcare professionals inside hospitals for the series El tiempo de cura. Surrounded by fear, exhaustion, and courage, I witnessed the fragile boundary between life and death.
With each of the 150 people I photographed, I began to sense the collapse of an old belief — the illusion of separation.
I understood then that we are one single body — intertwined, vulnerable, and profoundly connected to everything that exists.
As Deepak Chopra writes, “we are all connected, entangled — minds, bodies, universe.”
The human ego crumbled, giving way to a deeper search for meaning — in the spirit, in the universe, and in nature itself.

A few months later, when we were finally able to leave Spain, I went with my family to Barbizon, a place I have known for years, near the Fontainebleau forest.
There, I encountered a force that painters of the Barbizon School once described as “magical and spiritual.”
Corot called the forest “a cathedral,” and Rousseau saw it as “the dwelling place of nature’s soul.”
Following those echoes, I entered the forest as one enters a temple — in search of communion.

For the first time, I felt the need to turn the camera toward myself.
I undressed before it — with fear, but out of reverence, not vanity.
I wanted to dissolve my body into the forces that sustain life: light, earth, stone, and air.
My body — as a woman and a mother — became an antenna for that invisible vibration pulsing through everything.
I understood that we are made of 1% matter and 99% energy, and I longed to belong to that universal consciousness calling me.
As Marcelo Gleiser writes, “we are the universe becoming conscious of itself.”
By merging with nature, I perceived that this consciousness is not human but cosmic — a pulse that traverses all existence.

For five years, I returned to that forest in reverence and lived a continuous process of learning.
From the trees, I learned to respect the rhythm of the seasons; from the stones, the power of patience and permanence — that perfect duality in harmony.
I understood that nature is not a refuge but a teacher.

Each beam of sunlight filtering through the leaves — what the Japanese call Komorebi, “the sunlight passing through the trees” — revealed to me the impermanence of life.
That fleeting brilliance reminded me that existence is made of presence and absence, and that there is beauty in what vanishes.
Each shimmer became a prayer, another gesture of reverence.

In this context, photography became a ritual and a form of listening — a silent prayer before living matter, an attempt to record invisible learning.
The title Learning from the Stone came from a memory of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poem A educação pela pedra (Education by Stone):

“An education by stone: through lessons; to learn from the stone, to frequent it…”

Like the poet, I sought to learn from what is hard and essential — from what endures.
From the stone, I learned time and silence; from the light, impermanence.

This series is, therefore, a path of reconnection.
A dialogue between body, matter, and spirit.
A call to listen to what the universe still whispers — in the stones, the trees, the sun, and within ourselves.

_______

Learning from the stone

photographs of Emilia Brandão Carneiro

 

Between the impulse to return and the awe of forgetting, the female body wanders through an archetypal fo

rest, seeking to rediscover its own sap.
Light, which once illuminated paths, now overflows — opening a portal to another possible dimension.

In this act of surrender, the body unlearns the building of boundaries.
Instead, it learns the fertile rhythm of the seasons and the patience of stones.
The feminine here is matter in dissolution — a form that opens itself to welcome, and to be welcomed by, other forms of existence.

This body does not wish merely to belong to nature — it longs to be nature.
It allows rock to inscribe itself upon its flesh, sunlight to tattoo verses upon its skin, cosmic dust to become sand and raise new dwellings.

In a performance revealed through images, Emilia proposes a body in transit between human condition and destiny.
A body that does not seek to represent the landscape, but to merge with it — to experience, upon its own skin, the g

eological and vegetal memory of the world.

In Learning from the Stone, the gesture of mimicry is not an escape, but a return.
By reintegrating with vegetation, rock, and earth, the feminine body reawakens its primordial memory: that of cosmovision, where matter and spirit do not oppose but coexist.
It is at the threshold between the organic and the mineral that the desire for ontological reconnection emerges — the longing to rediscover the planet’s rhythm, to dissolve within the greater cycle of existence.

Between visibility and erasure, this series invites us to rethink the body not as a boundary, but as an ecosystem: a sensitive territory where flesh relearns to listen to the sound of stones and the murmur of leaves — and, in doing so, rediscovers its primeval nature.

 

text: Eder Chiodetto