Densities of Time

Please register for this workshop via mail to:

ail@uni-ak.ac.at

Accompanying Beatrice Tulagan’s installation What Happens Next? , this workshop asks us about what we do with the remaining time it takes to win the world.

What world are we building as future ancestors? How can the artifacts we leave behind tell the stories of our wildest dreams about climate justice? What is there to do then but speculate – and fight – for alternative futures and timelines?

The event is both a meditation on time and endurance and a hands-on workshop on what we leave behind as we lurch towards the future. There will be a short discussion to frame the session led by the artist followed by a materials workshop where we’ll get to work with our hands and practice collective speculation.

General material for the workshop is provided, but you are free to bring children’s clay, coloring materials, bond paper, hand ties, ribbons, sticks or similar.  

In many human cosmologies, time is a grand circle, eternally cycling between the past, present, and future. In others, time is an arc, a narrative plot that marches from a momentous beginning towards an apocalyptic end. In the Filipino view, meanwhile, time is perpetually attached to human flourishing. In Tagalog and many other Philippine languages, the word panahon translates to both ‘time’ and 'season.’ When something is described as ‘napapanahon’ – what is timely or opportune – time becomes indelibly human. In his essay ‘Densities of Time,’ Resil B. Mojares writes, ‘Native time was not homogenous, abstract, divided into fixed and precise units. It was ‘human’ time, reckoned in relation to the performance of life-sustaining activities and guided by the signs of an environment that was concrete, particular, and changing.’ 

Turning time on its head, climate injustice exists in its own temporal plane. In making sense of climate-related loss, time flows backwards, forwards, and back again. Sins in the past committed through the collusion of corrupt political dynasties and the fossil fuel industry endanger the unwritten futures of young people and the variety of presents outside the struggle otherwise available for many climate activists.

About the exhibition Future on Trial. Between Unruly Evidence and Unfinished Climate Justice:

The engagement with climate justice reveals a complex field of perspectives across multiple temporalities, geographies, and forms of knowledge. In this context, environmental destruction is entangled with economic interests, the uneven distribution of risks and responsibilities, colonial continuities, imperialist power relations, and geological deep time.

The exhibition Future on Trial. Between Unruly Evidence and Unfinished Climate Justice moves between two conceptions of justice. One that is produced and negotiated in courtrooms through scientific and legal evidence, data, and visual investigations, and another that understands justice as an unfinished, collective process, grounded in Indigenous knowledge, queer ecology, multispecies perspectives, and activism. Through a dialogue between artistic practices and scientific expertise in the field of climate litigation, the exhibition opens up a space between evidence and uncertainty, accusation and repair, institutional accountability and collective imagination.

Artists: adO/Aptive, Beatrice Adeline Chua Tulagan, Eline Benjaminsen, Forensic Architecture, Paolo Cirio, Prin Rodriguez, Radha D'Souza and Jonas Staal, Valentino Skarwan

Curators: Adriano Vinca, Camille Belmin, Elisabeth Falkensteiner