A tractor tyre lies half-buried in a field near an archaeological site on Paros. Cycladic light sometimes lends everything a mineral quality. I perceive it as a marble artefact, an eloquent remnant of a vanished civilization. The beauty of its treads evokes classical architecture; its circular form recalls the ouroboros. What is this object, once placed within the history of civilization? What story does it tell us?
The striking image of a fetus suddenly imposes itself upon me, with merciless clarity, inside the tyre.
What emerges is a relationship to the earth and to life distorted by industrial agriculture. For many, these giant tyres also embody a myth of strength and power. The earth and its primordial mud become, more than ever, a site of symbolic dissociation. We seem to separate ourselves from them through a closed, pressurized circuit: a sole of rubber.
What strikes me most, however, is the relationship to the womb, to a birth dependent upon a technical device. I imagine an umbilical cord no longer connected to a maternal body, but to an inner tube: a false breath, an artificial respiration. The tyre becomes an inverted womb, non-organic, a closed cycle with no horizon of release.
The circle, an archaic symbol of the cycle of life, becomes a technical cycle devoid of regeneration. It reveals neither beginning nor end, only suspension. The fetus already exists outside nature, yet has not entered the world.
Marble fossilizes a transitory state: becoming itself is frozen.
