Entanglement, 2018
Permanent installation of mosaic made of pebbles, sand, and cement

 

 

Last July, I and Lito would drive every morning, as early as possible to Moulari beach here in Nisyros, hoping every time that we would be the only people there. Every morning, we would spend a couple of hours shuffling slowly with our hands the wet landscape of shiny pebbles. Every now and then we would pick up one of the glossy stones and keep it in an empty water bottle. We would stop when the sun had already become intolerable.

A pebble is a clast of rock of a certain size, a solid aggregate of one or more natural minerals. During the millennia pebbles on this planet became smoother and smoother, slick and polished, scrubbing between each other, being worn by the countless waves, caressed by tentacles and mixed around by strong fins and underwater currents.

You have now to imagine rivers, the rivers of rainwater that we are all familiar with, but this time flowing in reverse, from the sea to the terrestrial landscape, dragging back the many submarine layers of rocky pebbles that lay on the ocean crust and pilling them up slowly ashore. In this way, flatlands become hills again. Then hills transform into the mountains that were once eroded by water, fires, winds and earthquakes, mountains that grow up once more, forming altogether what we know as the Earth’s continents.

Now, the several continents are pulling each other close again, restructuring into the single landmass that is known to us as Pangea.

During this time, volcano crevices formed the topography of the planet’s surface, spitting out molten rock from the insides of a much younger Earth. Every single drop of water disappears as time progresses backward to what is named by scientists the Hadean Eon, the age when Earth was a spherical rock resembling Hades hell, an environment of extreme heat and no life. A spherical rock getting smaller and smaller, becoming some hundreds of kilometers wide, then even smaller, the size of just some dozens of meters.

Finally, through a process that probably no one witnessed to unfold, a process represented only by puzzling computer simulations, the planet’s core that was once forged out of strong gravitational bonds between mineral formations, brakes apart. These mineral clusters, what scientific models show to be mere pebbles will scatter around space, amid the gas and dust created at the moment of the birth of everything.