Time

TIME

 

In my memory I carry the smell of wet earth and melting snow.

 

Time is relative.

 

Our feeling for time is always marked through an event or from the arising memory of that event.

 

Time is measurable.

Everything we do, feel or think happens within a time frame. The direct translation from German speaks about time space(s).

 

For some things we need more time than for others.

 

Embedded in the frame of time we live from birth to death. We are given a period. We depart. Time remains. If she had eyes, she would see how we arrive and leave, how we  are full of joy and suffering, how we love and hate, how we instigate wars, destroy the world and the never-ending renewal. She would perceive changes our planet is going through. We and everything that was before us and everything that will come after us.  Each life, a cosmos of its own, a small piece of the whole.

 

A tiny kernel of sand, in the light of one of the suns, being part of the big sound…

 

Our life is marked by temporal courses, which we have to follow: rhythms like day and night, seasons, childhood, youth and old age.

 

Bound to these rhythms we get led again and again to new horizons.

 

One says, we are given a certain amount of time.

We don`t have time, we are under time pressure or it is not yet our time or also we have all the time in the world.

 

Time heals wounds? Time is simply there. She does not do anything.

 

She is neither visible, nor audible. You cannot taste her but still we are talking about the taste of time.

 

She is always present in the past, the present and the future.

 

Time has no mercy. No matter what we are doing, she moves irrespectively. She does not care about life and death. But still she is unseparably connected to it.

 

In my performance TIME I attempt a sketch.

 

The performance:

 

I reduce my action.

I restrict it to rolling. Importantly I move continuously, without a break, as slowly as possible.

Irrespectively time goes by while we and everything around us is changing as well.

I am rolling over earth. It covers the floor, it is the base of the ground. I will become earth when I no long am.

My movements are minimal. I am diving into a continuous and inexorable slowness. I celebrate time.

 

I want to find out whether I can move from one point to another without getting noticed, whether I can be like time, whether I can hold on to that moment and make visible from what later on one might say: I did not notice how time went by.

 

I notice how the visible action steps back behind the inner experience.

I am conscious of every nuance of change.

The earlier nearly unbearable sense of slowness gets a new quality.

Through the conscious perception and doing of this simple movement it gains substance. I have the feeling that I am still very fast.

 

And then there comes that moment when the feeling of getting lost in time gets me. A wonderful and free feeling. Time doesn`t play a part any more.

 

What remains is my body, the earth, the space around me and the continuum of the movement, which melt in a sort of never ending transformation.

 

A piece of time becomes visible in body sculptural presence.

 

Duration: it takes me about 1½ hours for 5 metres

 

with Bob Rutman on his Bow Chime

 

2000, Kunstraum Offenbach, Germany