Is Time Real?

Movement | Video | Sound | Poetry
A research project on marking and sensing time through the body.
Developed as part of the BigCi residency (May - June, 2021).

PART 1 : ELEVEN CIRCLES

In order to measure time through my body, I set myself a task of repeating the same action over a period of eleven days. The action was to perform eleven circles, once a day, on the circular water tank which is a part of the BigCi residency. I started on the full moon day (26th June).

The parameter was to perform this action after I wake up and have a coffee. Since I didn’t set up the alarm clock to wake me up, nor had a set timing of how long I would take to finish the coffee, the hour of the action fluctuated revealing my natural rhythm, a visualisation of which you can see on the graph below.

The (invisible) horizontal line on the graph represents the day, and the (invisible) vertical line represents the time of the day I have performed the action, starting at 10:30am on day one, followed by 9am, 10am, 9am, 9.15am, 9am, 9am, 3pm, 9.45am, and 9.45am. The 3pm anomaly occurred because it was raining that day and I walked only when the rain eased.

The dots on the graph represent the length of each walk – one big dot stands for one minute and a smaller dot stands for half a minute. So, sometimes I walked the circle in 5 minutes, sometimes in 3 minutes; and this often depended on the weather, pointing to the interaction and correlation between the body and the site; how the elements and the season effect one’s movements, one’s rhythm. You can read my reflection on each walk - how I walked and why I walked that way - in this chart.

I have filmed myself performing this daily ritual. The camera was set in the middle of the circle and I passed in front of it eleven times. The video is a documentation of the process. It shows nine of eleven walks. The boxes gradually disappear (once the eleventh walk is completed) and the video, much like the graph above, is a visualisation of the rhythm pattern; showing both synchrony (at times I enter the frame in several of the boxes simultaneously) and asynchrony.

PART 2: WALKING MILES IN A CIRCLE

Another action I was performing, as a way to sense time, was an action of ‘walking miles in a circle’.

I have performed three walks on three different circular formations around the BigCi property. I did not time the duration of these walks; I allowed myself to walk for as long as I felt. Each of the walks took roughly 30 minutes and sometimes, as I walked, I would observe the changes in light and shades or changes in temperature, and these would give me a cue of how much time has passed and, sometimes, determine when to stop walking; i.e. if it was starting to get dark or cold.

To walk endlessly in a circle is, of course, a representation of the cyclical (rather than linear) and continuous nature of time. So while performing this ritual of endless circular movement, I was embodying time and aligning myself with nature or the natural. As I read, during the research process:

“Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle… The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles… The sun comes forth and goes down in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round…. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were.” (Hehaka Sapa)

PART 3: THE POEM

I refer to the idea of a circle being the most natural of forms in the poem I wrote during the residency.

The poem starts with: “To move in a circle is to align.”
And finishes with: “Moving cyclically as all else moves beneath our feet.”

It speaks of the schism between the pace of the city and the pace of nature, and the desire to return to another way of structuring our lives, a way that is more aligned with nature.

PART 4: TIME QUESTIONNAIRE

Parts of this poem were directly inspired by the conversation on time I had with Freedom Wilson, one of the other BigCi residents.

My practice often involves dialogues with others and I incorporate these (as a sound work) into the overall installation as a way to give work another dimension and extend it beyond my singular voice.

For this project I have created a Time Questionnaire and I set down with Freedom one afternoon to talk through it.

I WALKED AND PONDERED TIME ON THE LAND OF ORIGINAL AND ONGOING CUSTODIANS, THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, TO WHOSE RELATIONSHIP TO TIME I HOPE TO RETURN. I PAY MY RESPECT AND MY GRATITUDE TO THEIR ELDERS PAST, PRESENT, AND YET TO COME. THE LAND ON WHICH I WALK, THINK, WORK AND REST IS AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE ABORIGINAL LAND.