Les Racines du Temps

Les Racines du Temps (The Roots of Time) grew out of two periods of residency. The first was an enforced lockdown in a flat-studio in Ivry-sur-Seine, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The second was a research and creation residency at the École des Beaux-Arts de Marseille, within the transdisciplinary programme White Mountain College.

Contemporary temporal fascism pushed me to want to perceive time, to observe it and listen to it, searching it for clues on how to survive the transformation of the world in a time of pandemic. This is how these clock-objects of the (post-)Covid era were born.

The temporal dilation experienced worldwide during the first lockdown of 2020 led my practice towards a kind of “time weaving”. I first used the ropes from the performance 4 (a) ch/cords to bring into being surrealist objects that transposed the sensations felt while activating the danced piece.

Each clock model became the statement of a line of research: the study of knots and unravelling, listening to time and silence, reading poetry and novels, a cinematic perception of time. Nature is present too, through the changing flora that served as material for some of these time sculptures.

These surrealist everyday objects, whose function becomes absurd as time is reversed, strike at the heart of the narcissistic wound of human vanity. Installed together, the pieces answer one another; some devour each other and produce themselves. Time itself stretches into infinity.

Inspired by a passage from Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour, L’horloge de l’amour et du temps (The Clock of Love and Time) binds these two notions together. Gravity, which pulls us forward in space and time as much as towards the earth, gave rise to Chute avant (Forward Fall). Other clocks face the history of four centuries of slavery, torture and dehumanisation endured by Black and mixed-race people: Esclavage temporel (Temporal Slavery), Comment rectifier les erreurs du passé ? (How Can the Mistakes of the Past Be Put Right?) and Antagoniste n.01.

The project was the subject of a solo exhibition at POUSH in Clichy, where a performance was presented at the opening.