Gustaf Sobin

Looking backwards, we could only be searching for ourselves. Straying through the ruins and debris of past civilisations, we could only be hoping for glimpses – no matter how tenuous – of our long forgotten identities.

Even if the Neolithics weren’t the first to inter their dead in a flexed, fetal position – in a posture, that is, of incipient rebirth – they were the first to do so on a regular, collective, institutionalised basis. ‘Planted’, these germinal corpses, these embryos wrapped in all the regalia of an on-going existence, might well have been expected to ‘sprout’ at the appropriate moment: ‘spring’ into an afterlife of their own.

Running in a sequence of dismembered sections, the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes can be read as a kind of fragmented text. Its choked tunnels, collapsed archways, brief truncated arcades can be seen as the scattered passages, say, of some early ontological discourse.