The animal that carries its home on its back. Whose spine is fixed, a solid shell. The one who beats both Achilles and the hare; the one who paralyses himself to sleep and then wakes up to announce the spring; the one who, at will, can store sperm up to two years before she allows her eggs to be fertilized. Lonesome George, the last of his kind, apathetically fighting extinction with his Swiss girl-friend; Boncuk, whom we saved from a forest fire so that he could simultaneously eat and walk on cucumber peels; and The Tortoise from the Blade Runner humanity test “You’re in a desert, you see a tortoise, you flip it on its back…”

the world rests on a tortoise is a practice-as-research project focusing on the tortoise as a container in which we can engage with our relationship to home, to space, to earth, to distances, to lights, to time, to age and to agelessness, to conservation, to extinction, to death, to hibernating, to burrowing, to being invisible, to reappearing, to keeping going, to staying, staying still, staying on the road, staying the same.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/5947