To Husserl, time appeared as a comet: the head is our ‘now’ and the tail is the past moments that refuse to accept disappearance. Heidegger would add that ‘being in time’ constitutes our existence. Einstein stated briefly: “time is relative”. You see, nothing is simple here.
In a story, moments can be accelerated, squeezed into a point, or stretched to infinity, taking the viewer into another timespace. There are times when, in a good story, we lose count of the seconds, and in a hypnotic abstraction, we lose the very point of reference. Then perhaps it is the narrative that arranges our experience of time? For we saturate every second with an autonarrative – a dream or a memory of a bygone ‘now’.
Yet is it possible to recount time without a story? Can it be shown, extracted? For years, scientists have been spinning theories about the chronon – the quantum of time. But our perception does not perceive the quantum, and everything else is transformed into another story anyway…. Well then, where do we stand in relation to time?
This year’s OPEN CALL invites you to explore these dilemmas and doubts – whether in the form of abstract visions or out-of-the-box stories.
P.S. Good advice from the guys in Waiting for Godot:
“That passed the time. It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.”
