/time\
A catalogue of projects and conversations inspired by rest, time, productivity, slowing down, boredom, and natural rhythms.
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).
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). ~ READ MORE ~
WALKING MILES IN A CIRCLE
Developed as part of the BigCi residency (May/June 2021)
As a way to sense and embody time, I walked on three different circular formations around the BigCi property. I did not time the duration of these walks but allowed myself to walk for as long as I felt. Each of the walks took roughly 30 minutes. Sometimes, as I walked, I observed changes in light and shades, or changes in temperature, and these gave me a cue of how much time has passed and, sometimes, determined the end of my walking (i.e. if it was starting to get dark or cold).
To walk endlessly in a circle, without a destination, is a representation of the cyclical and continuous (rather than linear) nature of time. 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)
I refer to the idea of a circle being the most natural of forms in this poem. 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.
TIME QUESTIONNAIRE
HOW IS TIME A PART OF SPACE?
A chapter in SPACE BODY HABIT, co-authored with Elia Bosshard.
LOST REST
My interest in rest, work and productivity was sparked while working as curator with artist Julia Bavyka on the project LOST REST, a part of her ongoing Mladen Stilinovic Study Centre. LOST REST was a discussion and research platform we held at Galerija VN, Zagreb (Croatia) in June 2019. The project was supported by the Create NSW (NAVA) grant and Croatian Ministry of Culture.
~ see more ~
Mladen Stilinovic wrote essay ‘In Praise of Laziness’ and a statement ‘Work cannot not exist’.
ART-FASTER
A SOUND COLLAGE ~ Discussing art and productivity, work and non-work, monetary values etc. with artists Tom Malek, Julia Bavyka and Tessa Zettel via Buckminster Fuller’s quote: “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
SLEEPING RESIDENCY
We sleep around the work we need to do, obligations we have; around the stress of having to wake up because something needs to be done tomorrow. We don’t know what our natural sleeping rhythms are. What if we prioritised sleep over work, if we worked around sleeping, not slept around working? FIND OUT MORE
WHAT IS YOUR NATURAL SLEEPING RHYTHM?
Variety of artists and thinkers share their sleeping patterns.
JUST.DROP.INTO.THAT.
A sound collage and a text on “in-between” spaces in art practice when one idea is completed but the new one yet to be born. The text is an invitation to cherish the moments of halt (or creative void) and consider them as the most fertile and productive parts of practice.
Text is available HERE. Sound collage is made in collaboration with Trevor Brown and features Lux Eterna.
”It is in these places of darkness, ‘the fertile void’, that the ideas are actually growing, incubating. The making continues, though it might not feel like that. You might be journeying towards an unknown destination but you are moving towards something nevertheless. You are not wasting time. You are working with time.” (Lux Eterna)
URGENCY OF TAKING TIME
Text written for ADSR zine in reflection of the durational opera Sun & Sea (Marina), winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale of Art. It looks at the urgency of slowing down, and asks if boredom and laziness could save the world? Read HERE.
Laziness and boredom are loathed terms, but Walter Benjamin suggested that “BOREDOM IS A THRESHOLD OF GREAT DEEDS.” So what happens when we stop being lazy and bored, which is to say when we don’t take ‘time off’?
CLOUD WHISPERS
A meditative poem and video/sound installation about observing transience and embracing changes. ~ read it here ~
WASTING TIME
What do we have in mind when we speak about ‘wasting time’? Why does time feel slower or faster depending on how we fill it? Why do we feel uncomfortable with doing nothing? Is doing nothing / wasting time possible? Why might slowing down and doing ‘nothing’ be the most responsible thing to do right now?
I speak about this (and more) with theatre maker and performance artist Mish Gigor.
~ transcript ~