Stone dreams, The poetry of minerals is on display
Under the shop windows of The School of Jewelry Arts, The stones seem to breathe. From November 6, 2025 to March 29, 2026, the exhibition Dreams of Stones: Poetry and Minerals by Roger Caillois, Designed in collaboration with the National Museum of Natural History, it invites a singular journey: that of a mind for whom nature was a text, and the stone a metaphor for the world.
Roger Caillois, a writer of rigor and strangeness, has continued to explore the correspondences between the visible and the hidden. As a essayist, sociologist, and poet, he examined the polished surfaces of agate stones as if others were reading ancient manuscripts. Each inclusion, each groove became a sign, a echo of a language that predates man. This reading of the mineral, both rational and enchanted, is what the exhibition imagined by François Farges, curator and professor at the Museum, brings to light.
Nearly two hundred specimens, drawn from a collection carefully assembled between 1952 and 1978, interact here with excerpts from his major works, including The Writing of the Stones, published in 1970. These stones are not study objects, but interlocutors: they hint at imaginary landscapes, masks, and geological dreams. The journey unfolds like a notebook of exile, from Patagonia to China, tracing the inner journey of a man who wanted to understand nature not as a backdrop but as a thought.
In these showcases, the visitor’s eye becomes that of Roger Caillois. A researcher of forms, a surveyor of the marvelous, and a witness to a nature that is an artist. The exhibition reveals a constant tension between knowledge and fantasy, between crystal and word. Through the pages he loved so much, these marbles where chance draws landscapes, the portrait of a rare mind is also revealed, attentive to the way the world itself dreams itself.
Beyond the minerals, Stone dreams It celebrates a vision: that of a writer for whom beauty was not in ornamentation or possession, but in the silent reading of matter.
Visual emphasized:
Agate, probably from Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)
Paris, National Museum of Natural History, mineral collection
and gemmed, cliché François Farges
