There is something fascinating about the semi-liquid, plasma-like quality of asphalt.

Maybe it
is the lure of an impossible image, inaccessible either through the senses or the intellect: the
idea of liquid stone. Petroleum, from which asphalt derive, has its etymological Latin root in
petra = rock + oleum = oil: rocks oil. Caught in permanent flux between two states of matter
(solid and liquid) asphalts unstable condition brings to mind not just geological processes
like sedimentation and petrification, but also alchemical ones like distillation and
liquefaction. As a naturally occurring substance intervened by human agency (tekne) its
hybrid constitution avoids being easily classified as natural or artificial matter. One among
many hybrid conceptions of modernity, asphalt-concrete is simultaneously a product of nature
and an effect of culture its essence is dialectical, so to say.

Writing about the ominous evocations of concrete in his text Hormigon Crudo, Basque artist Asier
Mendizabal conjures the image of a heavy, semantic mud attached to its material surface a certain
layer of guilt. A similar image comes to mind when considering asphalt concrete. Asphalt-concrete
uses bitumen instead of cement as its bonding material. Bitumen is a naturally occurring semi-solid
form of petroleum that may be found in natural deposits or refined into a petro-derivate product. Unlike
cement, another ductile composite material that certainly evokes western teleological notions of
developmental growth and progress, asphalt directly depends on the systematic extraction of fossil
fuels. It has been used as a construction and sealing material from Sumerian to ancient Greek times,
way before the industrial revolution for example took place; an event some consider a landmark to
define the beginning of an actual geological era known as the Anthropocene. A term coined by the
Nobel Prize in chemistry Paul Crutzen to replace the Holocene as the current era in Earth's geological
history, due to the significant global impact that human activities have had on terrestrial ecosystems.

To think through mineral and geological metaphors can be seen as yet another attempt to
instrumentalize nature. However, the metaphorical impulse to blur the line between mind and
matter is constantly frustrated by the indifference of the latter. In other words: despite any
nave efforts to humanize matter, to make it sensible through poetic wishful thinking, no
thoughts can be definitely forced into it. It is stone-dead. Or is it?

To consider matter for its poetic plasticity and metaphorical aptness is to somehow
semanticize it to employ it as a vessel to convey meaning. Against this utilitarian aspect of
metaphors, art can be thought of as a space where perception is not unidirectional and subjectcentred, but a field of mutual influence between subjects and objects. Or in the words of
Edouard Glissant, art can be the locus of a poetics of relation; in Relation every subject is an
object and every object a subject.