'Without title, and still summer'

Yesterday I spoke to an oceanographer who told me that less than eight percent of the seafloor is mapped. Besides being unknown to humans, the seafloor exists in a constant process of creating and destroying itself. Tectonic plates break at their edges and slowly move away from each other. Magma bubbles up from the fissures to the surface, and as it cools in the seawater it turns into rock. This rock becomes part of the Earth's crust, and this process, called seafloor spreading, begins again.

As she explained this, I thought of Maria Tinaut and her archipelago of broken tiles, found in the field behind her house. The once-whole blue flowers are now a bed of broken petals. She took them to her studio to search for where the curved, blurred lines might have originally fit together, in an attempt to put the disjointed parts back together. According to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, “To be a good human being is to have a certain openness to the world, the ability to trust the uncertain beyond your own control, to the point where it can shatter you.” But what happens if you look at the kind of breakup Nussbaum describes? Tinaut’s piece Untitled (Blue 1) – several dozen almost-but-not-quite-fitting bits of tile agglomerated in grey mortar – offers an answer: behave like the seabed.