This text is a dialogic conjunction of working practices developed in and around specific quarries, with Karin Reisinger tracing the material and life-worlds of iron ore in Malmberget and Petra Lilja the limestone in Limhamn, both in Sweden. We walk and think with humans and non-humans such as rocks, stones and minerals through our respective practices and pedagogies of design and architecture. Our practices take place in and around quarries, extractive sites of mining. We come in after the machines, when it is time to think about how to move forwards, to deal with the losses, to repair and care and to find strategies of surviving and coming together in educational situations. Dealing with the large-scale spatial changes, we are deeply aware that we are participating in massive earthly and material movements. With this paper we also share connections between theory and practice, based on a feminist–materialist framework. These connections lead us to the various applied practices of sensing interdependency, experiencing embeddedness and extending the frame while zooming in and to its epistemological reverberations.