By the time we arrived, the weather had worsened. It is not raining but a glacial wind is blowing along the slope, curiously from the bottom to the peak. Low clouds hastily ascend the mountainside as if they wanted to exchange with the boulders lying on it, which instead slowly descend. Me and Alessandro decided that we have reached our destination for the day. A wooden five-metre-high crucifix faces the flatland below, now covered by a sea of clouds. At its foot, a section of trunk cut in two along its length forms a bench on which rests my fanny pack and Alessandro’s backpack. Perhaps we could have climbed more if we had left earlier this morning. The clouds rush through me, and when they surround me, they are colder than ever; unfortunately, I have nothing to wear but the still useless rain jacket I am already wearing. It’s a nice feeling though. The mountain walls are still warm, they may feel the touch of the low clouds in the same way I do. In front of me a cone-shaped slope is covered with grass and boulders of different sizes; in the centre crawls a long tongue of gravel that cuts in half the huge lawn. Some animal whistles, perhaps a marmot.

I keep quiet.

I can fathom those sediments’ slow movement of descent and destruction towards the bottom. That slide is like an unspoken message to decrypt: the long gravel drip marks the imprints of the gravel sedimentation trajectory, and each stone DNA decipher its properties capturing its momentary state of mutation.

After a dozen whistles, silence fell, again, ironically religious in front of that crucifix. I keep staring at that mould of gravel and boulders in the middle of the slope, as if I am waiting for something. It looks like they are sitting together in lament or contemplation, while the upward river of fog flowing on them smooths and caresses their heavy thoughts. They look humans, which makes them vibrant, close and similarly alive.

I still remember how obsessed I was with those creatures when I was a child. Creatures, in the apparent naive way of intending them, as animate beings, endowed with willpower, that inhabit childhood reality rather than fantasy; but also, in the conscious efficacy excess of those object-entities beyond the human ontological perception, and beyond the life-matter binary, in what Jane Bennett calls thing-power.^[11]

In their lively inorganicity resides a common vital materialism ^[12] that indistinctly permeates living and other-than-living beings, subjects and objects, and questions the edges and values of these two taxonomic categories. The rocks collected on the display cases in my bedroom were my roommates, animated within and without my imagination and which immanent liveliness, relatively far from my perceptive abilities, is recorded in the already visible decade-long mutual breathing.

The intensity of the silence that occupies the nights in the small burg where I grew up, has never been enough to listen the slow oxidative breath of those creatures; but they’re not passive matter, they move beyond direct human perception: a rhythmic cycle of inhalations and expirations transcribed on a geological scale score.

Dyeing opaque in a slow oxidation process, the previously shiny golden surfaces of the pyrite fragment still on top of my desk, have revealed themselves to be animated; they showed their breathing, their capacities of interacting with the moisture steamed out of my body, out of my touch; their organic-like traits. It is no coincidence indeed that the word animacy derives from the etymological root of soul, which in various ancient languages such as Sanskrit (atman), Greek (pneuma) and Latin (anima) means breath.^{[13] [14]}

The animacy of matter shows itself as a property related to the perceptive threshold of the observer, an approximation; an analog signal transformed into digital, that switches to 1 once reached an appropriate range to be captured. Not differently from the cyclical movements of organic matter, rock and mineral compounds animate beyond human direct sensing, and follow circular paths of recycling and transformation. Depending on the pressure, heat and chemical-physical modes of agglomeration, the quantities and structures of the mineral element’s rocks are made of can vary, positioning them along a gradient of intersecting species.^[15] This process is called lithogenic cycle, and within it, inorganic agglomerates act as living bodies, interdependent and active. Each of those boulders gathered in quiet contemplation represents a momentary state of matter, a mutation, an evolutionary stage. In their cyclical walk, the elements of the earth’s crust are continually transformed, disaggregated and re-aggregated from one form to another; and in doing so they exchange matter and act upon each other.

[fig.2] Garrels, Robert M., and Fred T. MacKenzie. ‘A Quantitative Model for the Sedimentary Rock Cycle’. Marine Chemistry 1, no. 1 (September 1972) Infographic of the quantitative model of the sedimentary rock cycle. Department of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii (U.S.A.) Department of Geological Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. (U.S.A.)

The same animate matter change the disposition and way of relating of its particles, mutating from one agglomerate to another. Every mineralogical aggregate, every rock, every inorganic element of the earth’s crust carries a story within itself: a story of crossings and mutations from one state to another, from one body to another. Geological and other-than-geological bodies. The lithogenic cycle reveals itself not dealing with the genesis of the lithos, but rather with the re-organization of it. Beneath the human perception threshold and through geological time frames, the lithosphere comes alive and the lithogenic cycle emerges as a consequence of its liveliness.

The vital materialism that runs through the rocks on that slope and the animism projected onto them, in a self-reinforcing act nourish each other raising a progressive lively spiral that lifts them from the state of inert passivity which human unempathy, and life exceptionalism, relegated them into.^[16] Under the lenses of vital materialism, anthropomorphism does not act as a narcissistic practice of projecting one’s image onto other organisational systems; rather, it acts on hierarchical mental structures by uncovering a world of resonances and similarities that would otherwise have remained buried.^[17] Conceptualizing rocks or mineral fragments as creatures gives them a shape, if not anthropic at least biotic, relatable and easily empathizable with. Such levelling is useful to the de-categorization of entities by making them interchangeable in hierarchical terms: the human being as a mineral agglomerate or the lithogenic aggregates as a genetic outcome. It’s an embodied practice of empathy.

Thus, parallels are drawn between material forms in nature and culture. The ontological categorisation of being, divided between subjects and objects, is questioned by exposing a world of aggregates and materialities, a world of isomorphisms.^[18] The mechanistic paradigm of a universe made up of distinct parts reveals, beneath the human perception threshold, a reality made up of forms that, in the similitude of one to the other, mutate, immanently, into each other.

Earth particles, crossing aeons, walk transparently through bodies, aggregates, and isomorphies, nourishing them and giving them flesh. I wonder how I am transparent to them too, if I can call myself a lithogenic incarnation. If I am a lithogenic morphology myself.

I look once again at the small ceremony between rocks. I take a picture of their ritual; I would like but I don’t join them. Instead, I stay stand contemplating from distance, like them, that settlement.

[fig.3] (2023) View of the sky from Mt. Cavallo track. Pordenone, Italy.

On the small terrace on which I stand, someone has assembled small stone circles here and there to mark the presence of shy blossoming edelweiss bushes. A tiny but sweet act of care. I take two pictures of one of them, then, in an unconscious act of isomorphism, I decide to lie down, side to it, and look at the sky for a while. I would like to try to feel what one of those rocks on the slope feels.

I feel exposed and fragile here. I am at the mercy of the elements; my bones would be easily eroded.

Despite the view limited by the low clouds the disarming openness of the sky frightens me: everything is so wide. I am not frightened by the height but rather by the non-existent risk of falling into the chasm above me. Like if a breeze too strong from below would drag me even higher with the next bank of fog. I open my palms and turn them to the ground, as if to hold myself and prepare for the fall; but I do not tighten them. I simply make sure that the ground beneath me is still there.

In that very natural gesture, I see myself belonging to the Abyss, the need to feel the mud under my feet, under my palms; like one of those creatures that Donna Haraway calls chthonic. Belonging to the earth, to the humus, to the Abyss, chthonian comes from the ancient Greek khthonios, meaning of the earth. In Greek mythology, these figures are depicted as beings from the underworld, subterranean creatures opposed to the astral gods; Hesiod wrote about them as sea demons, fearsome evil creatures intertwined with nature forces. ^[19]

In an act of hierarchical subjugation, the sky-gazing man has opposed the earth to the heavens by subjugating the Abyss and its creatures to the astral world of the divine. The chthonic Nature, through these narratives, become a malign and imperfect force that challenges benevolent human-like Gods: a dichotomy between astralized forces and the Abyss has been drawn. But chthonic creatures are older than these: the narratives of Ptonia Theron, or the Sumerian Ouroboros stem from a time when human abstractions did not dictate hierarchies between nature and the divine world. Far from those structures, abyssal creatures were linked to cycle of life and death, inextricably tying human with the liveliness of the earth; and it is from this ancient vision of the Abyss that Donna Haraway start drawing a chthonic ecosystem that subverts the patriarchal logic of nature’s hierarchisation to the semi-divine man. A place where the creatures act in symbiosis, shaping a sympoietic system where organisms eat and digest each other; and where humans are no exception.^[20] Indeed, the word human proves itself chthonic: closely related to the term humus, earth, specifically moist, watery and therefore alive and cultivable, the etymological roots of this term draw several parallelisms with the ground world.^[21] A narrative closer to the holism of the Ouroboros than to the dualist representation of Olympus and the Gorgons.

[fig.4] Attributed to Polygnotos. (ca. 450–440 BCE) Terracotta pelike showing Perseus beheading the sleeping Medusa. The Met Muesum, New York.

Despite the difference in the genesis of the concept, Haraway’s narration resonates with the way Hidetaka Miyazaki, director of FromSoftware, depicts the relationship between humanities and the Abyss in the videogame Dark Souls. “The Abyss is an ecosystem capable of creating life, as generated by one of the core components of the First Flame [...] it is uninhabitable to all beings aligned with Fire including the Gods. In contrast, any beings aligned with or indifferent to the Abyss (such as humans) are able to roam it with no risk of harm or corruption.” (Murray 2019) In Miyazaki’s work, the Abyss is described as a corrupt place, a manifestation of humanity’s dark side when left unchecked; but also as primordial soup, a generative agent of life and that for this cradle for humanities: black shadows, small chasms (or abysses) describe “the base form of human beings”, entities independent from their bodies that wander hollow in it.

While Haraway’s Abyss narrative is aimed at the subversion of human exceptionalism and the mental hierarchical structure whereby humanity (and the Gods as a consequence) is superior to nature, Miyazaki’s painting stems from an extremely anthropocentric worldbuilding, calling the Abyss as a dark manifestation of the “unchecked” human souls and therefore corrupt.^[22] But, despite the divergent narrative intentions, the two share unexpectedly common traits.

Starting from the opposition to the astral manifestations of the divines, Haraway conceptualise this dualism in the power of the Abyss to subvert patriarchal and hierarchical interpretations of nature and humanity; for Miyazaki, instead, the opposition is more factual “[only] beings aligned with or indifferent to the Abyss are able to roam it with no risk of harm or corruption”, and the Gods are not among them. Cradle of humans, in both narratives the Abyss breaks the artificial umbilical cord that keeps humanity connected to its divine exceptionalism: the human becomes humus and adam becomes adamah,^[23] deeply connected to the earth, to the mud, to the underground; and instead, they describe it as a generative and ecosystemic environment which, in its sympoietic becoming, life inherently take part to it.

Emerging from the interaction of its components, a sympoietic system not only needs the relationship between its parts in order to thrive, but is the complex of the relationships themselves. Ecosystems, for example, are sympoietic structures, and they can be interpreted as emergent behaviours and relational entities which spatial and temporal boundaries, unlike autopoietic systems,^[24] are not well delineated, but rather blurs away in the context they are settled. In the sympoiesis of its creatures, the Abyss thus takes the form of what Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber defined as a holobiont.^[25] An entity far from the One and the individual, in which the creatures taking part to it, its node of relationships, create each other through material involvement.^[26] But also each chthonic entity, as in Miyazaki’s illustration of humanities, is a small chasm itself, and therefore constitutes both node and network of a sympoietic system.

[fig.5] Posted by Daifukkatsu in Humanity Phantom page of Dark Souls Wiki (2014) Humanity Phantoms in the Chasm of the Abyss. Dark Souls.

This chthonic newborn holobiont does not only involve organic entities, but also inorganic ones: in the symbiotic co-dependency between living and non-living actors, molecules of different complexities constitute information and exchange material between the biological and geological realms, which, by crossing each other sympoietically, break the ontological chains that keep them separate. What the concepts of symbiosis, sympoiesis, and co-evolution share is that they commonly refer to the context of interactions within the disciplinary realm of biology; in this sense, the use of such terms to describe relationships between and with the other-than-living returns to matter the anima-cy lost in the ontological subordination process of the geological to the organic. Indeed, co-evolutionary and symbiotic traits are not exclusive to the organic realm; rather, the biosphere, atmosphere and lithosphere have always experienced co-evolutionary processes. James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in their formulation of the Gaia Hypothesis^[27] question the profoundly anomalous chemical composition of the atmosphere as evidence of this co-evolutionary behaviour. “[...] the word Gaia will be used to describe the biosphere and all of those parts of the Earth with which it actively interacts to form the hypothetical new entity with properties that could not be predicted from the sum of its parts.” (Lovelock and Margulis 1974) In their identification of shared behaviour, Lovelock and Margulis extend the tentacles of Gaia’s macro-creature outside the boundaries of the biosphere to reach agents commonly described as passive (and therefore lacking in evolutionary capabilities). But the comparison with the nearby planets of the solar system, makes visible the organic-inorganic co-evolutionary proceeding of this web, that allowed life to thrive on the planet.^[28] In the meanwhile, chemical and physical reactions between atmosphere and lithosphere have diverted the evolutionary progression of organic systems as well. Through the absorption and processing of lithogenic components, organisms have influenced the formation of new mineral patterns, redirecting the sedimentation paths of the lithosphere itself.^[29]

For this reason, organogenic rocks such as limestone or graphite can be understood as the result of evolutionary processes of a breathing lithosphere in dialogue with the biota. The symbiotic exchange between inorganic spheres and biosphere is integral to their mutual existence as such; Gaia’s inherently co-evolutionary behaviour results in a dynamic equilibrium between its parts acting both as a system and as the whole of a historical entity. Thus, from well-defined margins the tentacles of sympoiesis extend out, searching for our common relational entity, our shared bio-mineral system, and continue, further, to spread the Abyss on the fabric of existence; fusing bodies and networks together. Whether biological or mineral, chthonic tentacles branch to and intertwine living and other-than-living aggregates in co-evolutionary processes on multiple space-time scales; beyond the biological/geological dualism. We are not different: mineral and organism, knots and networks, we’re both made up of relations. In the dialogue between me and the rock aggregate side to me, the chemical exchange is our present language, our holobiont and our piece of Abyss. But this present chemical language is nothing but an echo of an irreducible common past, not limited to sharing a space, but written in terms of genetics, and kinship.

In the slow but inexorable progression of the lithogenic cycle, the chthonic creatures take part to the Abyss, symbiont after symbiont, network after network, aggregate after aggregate; banished and far from the astralisations of the Gods. In our momentary organisational states, earth particles are cyclically embodied and scattered; a time-encompassing interaction rooted in our belonging to Gaia, in our common kin and blood.

Organic matter, fossil, sediment, stone: the vibrant lithogenic stream fills the subterranean chambers of volcanoes with incandescent material and pushes up the mountain chains; but it also pulses, tepid, the blood in my veins.

[fig.6] (2023) Circle of stones to mark the presence of the edelweiss bush. Pordenone, Italy.

Still lying on the ground, I turn my head towards the stone of the circle closest to me. Cast in the pale limestone, several marine relics take part to an act of care between entities of the Abyss

Fragments of shells and ancient sea creatures fused into the same rock body surround the tiny edelweiss bush in order to flag its presence. Many of these molluscs, after death, settled on the seabed, accumulated and, buried by the sediment, became embedded in the present-day Alpine geological formations.^[30] Their hybrid nature proves the patient, transparent walk of earth particles, which incarnation after incarnation are transported along and through Earth’s crust; but also, the existence of a material vibrancy in any entity not considered matter. The fossil organizational state represents the bio-mineral lineage gate: the living beings as sediment and the stone as former- (or future) alive bodily remains. A relational moment in the middle of two others, the organic and the inorganic, communed by the animacy inherent to networks; and in which the mineralogical kin, the common substance,^[31] flow through like blood or magma streams.

During the fossilization process, body structures can be replaced by other minerals or mineralise themselves by chemical modification; this process is also called diagenesis. ^[32]

Fossilization and diagenesis are not perfect synonyms, but both express the modifications of an object through its historical or geological history. According to the 19th century geologist Karl Wilhelm von Gümbel, the term diagenesis describes a post-sedimentary, non-metamorphic transformation of sediments into a different sedimentary rock at low temperatures and pressures.^[33] The fossilisation process acts as a subgroup of the diagenetic ones, embedding the organogenic component in the process. It describes the transition from one organisational genesis to another, a mutation beyond-species, beyond-individuals and beyond the concept of life itself; but also, it passively reinforces the consanguinity between organic and lithogenic creatures as part of the same lineage.

Vital materialism act like genetics beyond genetics. Fossilization embodies the evidence of the after death bodily mutation’s continuity in the lithogenic cycle; of the common belonging to the same, earthly kin. A double directional kinship that thrives along the moment between the living and the never lived, and that occupies the touching point of the two semantic bubbles that separate what is considered alive and what is not. Inorganic animacy indistinctly permeates organisms and in-organisms by showing itself in the chemical exchange of sympoiesis and the inherently co-evolutionary properties of Gaia; through the fossil organizational state the vibrancy becomes embodied: the demonstration of the cyclical transition from organic to inorganic form (and vice versa) of the lithogenic cycle.

Bringing testimonies from the Abyss, as if to reveal the unspoken lithogenic origins of those alpine flowers, the circle of pale limestone rocks takes a picture of the neritic waters that occupied this area during the Triassic. ^[34]

[fig.7] (2024) Organogenic alpine limestone with crystals of calcium acetate. Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

Like the nearby Dolomites, these limestone mountainous aggregates are mainly formed by carbonate organogenic rocks;^[35] here innumerable terrestrial particles have claimed life, and after blossoming, have settled and lithified in these geomorphologies. The source of such huge quantities of carbonate organic material has been traced in the so-called carbonate platforms, underwater mounds of carbonate organic matter precipitated and accumulated on the seabed.^[36] The platform, made of former-alive material, serves as a foundation for future life forms above it, which in turn nourish the platform itself. Hybrid organic-inorganic co-evolutionary systems, equipped of the emergent properties that drive their growth, thrive and renewal.^[37] The organic boundary of a carbonate platform is difficult to delineate: lives generated on top of the remains of others, old organisms that act as foundations for new ones, sediments that emerge in living systems to feed the geomorphology from which they developed from.

In the sedimentary progression of this chthonic system, genetics and lithogenetics, collaborate and determine each other in a feedback loop: the result is a sympoietic ecosystem, capable of evolving from the interaction between parts, and to testimony the Abyss’ ceaseless becoming.

Suddenly I feel myself walking in a graveyard, and that previously ironic silence becomes real and respectfully heavy. Each of these ancient cliffs stands as more than mere geological formations; they emerge as ossuary, funerary monuments, ecosystemic fossils. Somehow, at different moments in time, this mountain has been alive, and organic. Layer after layer, the geomorphology on which my back sets has embodied an organism, has claimed life. The result of an unexpected co-evolutionary alchemy that is not limited to the gene but goes far back through eons. These ridges are genetically driven geomorphologies, in the meaning that the gene determined the genesis of this rock, its lithogenic path.

The emergence of biomineralizing genetic behaviour^[38] in cyanobacteria gave them the ability to synthesise calcium and carbon from the shallow waters in which they thrived, deviating lithogenic sedimentation patterns, and affecting the production of the future mountain clusters.^[39] The inorganic implications of biomineralization go beyond the narrow realm of biology and involve the breathing of Gaia system. The sheer volume of calcium carbonate and silica produced by marine organisms dominates important aspects of ocean chemistry, and consequently those of the atmosphere as well.^[40]

The evolutionary development of organisms with genes capable of creating structures through biomineralization confirms in two directions the continuity of intent of organic and non-organic aggregates. [fig.9 - 10] If on one way the ability to form calcium carbonate, silica or phosphorus structures can be decisive in terms of the geomorphological development of certain geographic areas; similarly, the abundance of a specific resource can be led by biological or geological processes, and decisive in the evolutionary development of systems as individual or species, or the emergence of certain genes over others

DNA not only act as agent on sedimentation patterns but is mineral embodiment itself: life is not alien to geological happening. Organisms are pure mineral flesh. A relentless rain collapses the skeleton of power that dooms the Abyss, and its minerals melt to nourish the generative ecosystem that previously lay at its feet. Under this newly casted shadow of a disrupted hierarchy, the chthonic creatures thrive and regenerate; and the organic is left nothing more than a random expression of a far-reaching tentacle of the Abyss, a geologic happening embodiment, a mineralogical aggregate.

[fig.8-9] Addadi, Lia, and Stephen Weiner. ‘Control and Design Principles in Biological Mineralization’. Angewandte Chemie International Edition in English 31, no. 2 (February 1992) Microscopic views on organogenic aragonitic biomineralized crystals. Dead Sea.

The wind has exhausted its force and the cloud banks that were previously rushing towards the summit of the mountain, slow down to fall back to earth in the shape of rain. The first raindrop has fallen on the clump of edelweiss in the centre of the circle of rocks, the second one printed on my T-shirt; the weather is changing, a sign that it is time to turn back. It is the end of a cycle: as this water runs, it will slowly dissolve the ecosystem fossil on which I’m laying on and will transport the precious minerals set in these limestone agglomerates, downstream, to feed the valleys underneath.

I stand up with some haste but still enjoying the sensation of the frozen droplets crashing on my skin. One of the fragments at the periphery of the marking circle will come down with me, it will be my sedimentary companion. I pick it up, almost unconsciously, and holding it in my hand I head for the wooden bench.

I call out to Alessandro, who in the meantime has wandered off towards the tongue of boulders and gravel, telling him that is time to leave. I collect both bags from the foot of the crucifix and set off, towards the path from which we came. In the increasing rain, I put on the hood of the so far useless K-Way and together we begin our descent. As the raindrops persistently hit my skin searching for my bones, I try to keep the friction between my shoes and the trail gravel that seems instead to run down the mountain by itself. In the parallel isomorphy of the descent, the bones and the rest of the minerals in my body join the sedimentation process of their kin on the slope, embodying a life-long erosional process.

The system of myself emerges from the aggregate of these particles slow descent. Pushed by the water that now beats on the hood of my rain jacket I descend in altitude: in this act I deny divinities, human exceptionalism and the system hierarchies that have dictated my perception, to join the Gorgons and sea demons that inhabit the generative underground niches of the Abyss. Every step transforms potential energy into kinetics under the pull of gravity and the guidance of this gravel track.

I am isomorphically following the erosive course that will inevitably lead to the exhaustion of the energy emerging from the mineralogical aggregate of my body; and that will lead my system-individual to disgregate and finally settle. Once reached the bottom I will become sand at the foot of this mountain, leaving behind, at the side of the path only the fragment I gathered from uphill, the inexistent abstraction of my One.

The genes and mutations that have transformed me are not even mine, they are the geological memory of this planet and proof of our reciprocal being. I am sediment in this lithomorphic movement of descent, and I am also sediment in the organomorphic life-long movement of myself; and I will be sediment as well in setting down my bones and blood to the ground.

I interpret this thesis as the result of a process of sedimentation, emerging from the accumulation and agglomeration of personal experiences and knowledge, scientific research and philosophical interpretations; as well as mediated by a cyclical interchange of real and metaphysical interpretations of phenomena that have defined its narrative form. Thus, the value of this thesis arises from the emergent properties of the research agglomerate itself, from the interrelation of its parts.

This investigation is not only intended to play on the posthumanist level of analysis, rather it works on three levels of exploration of the capacities of the aggregate. The geological agglomerate and its ability to act as vibrating matter, and thus emerge in alternative forms to the “passive” mineral aggregate; showing interaction capacities with and within organisms, abilities to move below the human perceptual threshold in the lithogenic cycle and exchange with other spheres of Gaia. The potential of the porous edges of interdisciplinary aggregates in promoting alternative perspectives that result in new scientific models; and that stems from the application of the systemic paradigm on a disciplinary level. The studies that have fuelled the research on the case study of inorganic aggregates are for the most part disciplinary crosses, hybrids between vertical fields of study. And the thesis itself as an aggregate of knowledge, mediated by personal experiences and nourished by isomorphisms capable of relating the author, the reader and the subject matter.

Within this multilayer frame, the lithogenic cycle act, indeed as case study; the lenses through which to put into perspective the properties of aggregates and the value of the relations between parts. Using as a research reference a process capable of generating and guiding the transformation of agglomerates supports the value for a systemic view of entities, and thus aware of the capabilities of relations and aggregates.

As well as the thesis is intended as sedimentation phenomena, each chapter is an erosive act aimed at questioning the hierarchies that guide the perception of reality, and that deposits, in the form of an amalgam, a new agglomerate, a primordial soup from which the generative capacities of the destroyed hierarchies emerge: perceptive possibilities of relations with and between them.

Starting from the hierarchical structure that divides the object from the subject, the first act aims to erode the dualism between active and passive matter by searching for the vibrancy of it below the threshold of perception. The lithogenic cycle becomes an enormous lung in which agglomerates of stationary and rocky matter breathe and change form to form. The lithogenic cycle becomes a huge lung in which, agglomerates of static and rocky matter breathe and change from form to form in a systemic assemblage; a transformative cycle, in which the same shared particles mix and transform from one agglomerate to another, revealing the concept of genesis as a systems’ cataloguing method rather than an actual act of genesis. From the lithosphere to the pyrite fragments collected in the room where I grew up, the immanent form of things also occurs under the anthropomorphisation of them, used as a tool to further empathize with such “seemingly” different subjects. In the second chapter, other ontological limits are eroded, transforming the spatial and temporal perimeter of the individual into a porous surface into which other “individualities” blur. Through the narratives of the Abyss, the values of human exclusivism and the division between nature and culture are questioned and then reconnected to the earth, to the humus. The Abyss is revealed as a sympoietic ecosystem in which individualities (and consequently the components of the mechanistic paradigm) cross over each other to form a new, inherently multiple and systemic unity. These narratives are reflected in the Gaia Hypothesis developed by Margulis and Lovelock: the chthonic holobiont demonstrates the symbiotic and co-evolutionary relationships that exist (and have always existed) between organic and inorganic beings. Each individuality of Gaia is a node and system that takes full part in the lithogenic becoming by sharing its particles with the earth’s crust; vibrant matter originating from the clustering of this elements, a set of internal and external that make up porosities. The erosional journey ends in the third chapter, where the hierarchical structure between biological and geological realms is finally broken down: DNA becomes not only an agent of sedimentation but lithogenic cycle itself, and the organic creatures that take part in the very becoming of the Abyss become life-long erosional processes. In analyzing the ontological value of fossilization processes in the systemic view of the lithogenic cycle, the Dolomites embody an ecosystemic fossil resulting from an evolutionary process beyond the organic; and enabled by the genetic development of biomineralization processes. The overlap between disciplinary aggregates allowed a vision outside the realm of the merely biological or geological, thus identifying in sedimentation processes the communion of intent between organic and inorganic becoming.

Finally, the parallelism between inorganic and disciplinary aggregates finds a meeting point in sedimentation processes: the lithogenic cycle has proven the ability of inorganic aggregates to emerge in complex organic systems; and at the same time, disciplinary aggregates have fueled research paths that challenge disciplinary dogmas.

At the end of this autoethnographic narrative, the anthropomorphic approach that initially facilitated empathizing with other-than-organic creatures is totally reversed, reflecting inorganic isomorphies in organic systems: from rock fragments as creatures to creatures as erosive systems themselves.

Isomorphy becomes an embodied practice, in a critical time of climate and social crisis, to establish empathy with organic and other-than-organic subjects; to reevaluate the concept of self as part of an ecosystem of agents, as part of an environment; to look critically at the perceptual hierarchies that drove, and are driving deeper the world into a planetary crisis. Empathy is understood not only in an emotional sense, but primarily in an analytical sense, in the ability to see correlations, similarities and relationships between subjects, and in the ability to see subjects as systems of relationships, not inert to external changes.

The amalgam resulting from this sedimentation process constitutes the systemic aggregate for future multidisciplinary research capable of challenging perceptive structures. Fostering a deeper critical analysis of hierarchies of perception that dictate our way of relating to other subjects, may reveal how these may have affected today’s climate crisis and how a systemic view may create new keys to understand relationships between entities. In the necessary push towards more ecosystemic models of study, research potentials can be directed towards cross-disciplinary studies on the interactions between biotic, abiotic and naturecultural systems, conglomerating disciplinary fields into new emergent networks; and through the search for isomorphies between subjects promote the exchange of analogies between research areas and so alternative methods of research.

Lastly, thanks to all the people who directly and indirectly fed, challenged and contributed shaping this amalgam.

Thanks to the tutors, editors and heads of the GEO—DESIGN department for their guidance. Thanks to my colleagues who shared with me an emotional and unforgettable journey. Thanks to my friends for always being there. And special thanks to my family Annalisa and Flavio for their unconditional love and trust; and to Federica and Sandro for being and having always been a source of inspiration.