Nadine M. Kalin

What Is Withheld Does Not Lack: Waystop Pedagogy as Earth Scores in the Critical Zone

This project responds to the call’s invitation to engage apophatic practice through artistic and research forms that attend to ineffability, unsayability, and the limits of knowledge by asking what forms of pedagogy emerge when these limits are not resolved but sustained. Rather than approaching the unsayable as absence, the project treats it as a condition of relation that must remain unavailable to capture.

The project develops waystop pedagogy as a practice-based inquiry in which (un)learning occurs through durational relation under constraint. Here, art pedagogy is not oriented toward interpretation, clarity, or expression, but toward structuring encounters that remain partially inaccessible—where relation persists without stabilization as meaning. Waystops name these conditions. They are not activities or outcomes, but interruptions in the anticipation of explanation, documentation, and understanding, wherein default relations might be reorganized.

This orientation recognizes that the geologic is not an external object of study but a condition of contemporary life—something we live within rather than observe from outside (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2013). Within this condition, relation to land is shaped by histories of extraction that cannot be undone, requiring pedagogical forms that remain with irreversibility rather than seeking repair.

The core of the project consists of two earth scores—Geologizing and Soiling—presented as single-page visual works. These scores function as art-pedagogical forms that enact apophatic conditions rather than describe them. They are minimal, constraint-based protocols that structure encounter without explanation, requiring participation rather than interpretation.

Geologizing stages a tension between two artistic conditions of relation. In Bad Luck, Hot Rocks (Thompson & Orr, 2014), returned stones accumulate as evidence that extraction cannot be reversed; the desire to repair emerges only after removal, within damage. In contrast, Brazilian artist Luana Vitra’s practice refuses this sequence, attending to mineral matter as already active, historically charged, and irreducible to human use. Materials are not recovered but encountered as forces that exceed possession and return. The score does not reproduce extraction or its repair. It sustains the tension between them: contact without restoration, duration without possession, relation without closure.

Soiling operates through a different register. Drawing on Marcus Maeder’s (n.d.) Sounding Soil project, it engages subterranean listening where soil activity becomes audible without becoming fully knowable. Listening is structured as embodied duration without identification or separation. This extends through mycelial thinking (Andreotti et al., 2018), where relation disperses without boundary, center, or containment.

Both scores unfold within the Critical Zone (Latour, 2019, 2017), where human and more-than-human processes are inseparable, and draw on Indigenous conceptions of land as pedagogy (Rose-Antoinette, 2015; Simpson, 2014), where learning emerges through relational accountability rather than representation.

The project enacts withholding as a pedagogical and artistic condition—not as absence, but as refusal to render relation into knowledge, use, or clarity. The earth scores do not illustrate the argument; they enact it, requiring engagement rather than interpretation. In this way, the project contributes a model of art education that does not resolve the limits of knowing but sustains them.