07. The erratic boulder
An erratic boulder is a stone out of place.
Its presence in the landscape interrupts a continuity. Its mineral composition does not necessarily match that of the ground that hosts it. Its form, material and origin tell a story that belongs elsewhere.
In geology, the term identifies a rock fragment carried by a glacier and deposited at a distance from its place of origin. Some of these boulders travelled tens or hundreds of kilometres before coming to a halt. At the end of the ice age the ice retreats. The stone remains.
The erratic boulder is the visible trace of a movement long since ended.
Looking at it today, it is hard to imagine the forces that moved it. Its immobility tends to erase the memory of the journey. And yet its presence bears witness to a landscape that no longer exists and to a movement whose cause we can no longer see.
But not all boulders that appear isolated have travelled.
On the Isola del Giglio, for example, large granite blocks emerge from the ground and the vegetation like autonomous bodies. They are not erratic boulders in the geological sense: they belong to the same rock formation as the place. It is the fracturing of the granite, together with long processes of weathering and erosion, that has gradually separated them from the original mass. They did not arrive: they stayed, while what surrounded them was transformed.
This difference matters. On the one hand there is a stone that becomes autonomous because it is transported; on the other, a stone that becomes autonomous because it is freed from the matter that contained it. In both cases, what appears in the landscape is a volume that has acquired an identity of its own.
It is this autonomy of form that interests Cavenago.
The erratic boulder nevertheless remains at the centre of the work because it has a further condition: it is already a transported object. It does not belong to the place where it lies, it does not necessarily share its matter, and it arrived there through a force that is no longer visible today. In the landscape it is a foreign body that, over time, the landscape has accepted.
Building one, then, does not simply mean introducing something artificial into a natural context. It means artificially repeating an operation that nature has already performed: separating a form; and then setting it in motion, transporting it, leaving it elsewhere.
The difference is that this time there is no glacier.
Which leaves the practical problem: where does one begin?
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Granite boulder in balance, Isola del Giglio
Erratic boulder in Val Bavona, Ticino
Large granite blocks emerging in the woods, Isola del Giglio. Fracturing and weathering have gradually separated them from the original rock mass, without their ever having moved.
Granite boulder in a pine wood, Isola del Giglio