IN SEARCH OF STOLEN TIME

Secularly, the passing of the day used to be gauged by the slow movement of celestial bodies. Nowadays, the interface of the world grows clear or dark at the command of modulations in screen brightness, symbolized in smartphones by a small sun. In a strange paradox, the day is set out in the palms of our hands, while the experience of its unfolding slips through our fingers. 

In search of stolen time approaches distinct forms of temporality as opposed to the 24/7 world — where we distance ourselves from sensible reality as we inhabit, for most of our hours, digital zones whose screens, ever flat and clean, simulate a temporality in which the marks of time never come. Or else: one that unravels through uninterrupted dynamics of stimuli, which ultimately hold us hostage in constantly distracted attention.

The three clusters that comprise the exhibit are presented as chapters in a sort of pedagogy of time.

The hero as a bottle proposes a dislocation of the centrality of the heroic imaginary by privileging the ordinary. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) mentions a glossary created by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) where the word “hero” is replaced with the term “bottle.” This operation is a criticism of the hero-centric approach to storytelling. As such, attention to the commonplace picks up, from within the fabric of the days, minimal narratives and potential surprises which inhabit the meshes of the commonplace.

Em Frequência dos hábitos recordamos que, na repetição dos gestos mais banais — escovar os dentes, riscar um fósforo, cortar uma fruta — podem habitar desvios inauditos. Assim, a repetição surge como recurso poético que aponta para o cotidiano como campo de invenção e subversão. 

Frequency of habits reminds us that, in the repetition of the most mundane gestures – brushing one's teeth, striking a match, slicing fruit –, extraordinary deviations may dwell. Thus, repetition arises as a poetic resource that points to daily life as a field of invention and subversion.

Luisa Duarte | Curator

Daniela Avellar – Assistant Curator 

Lucas Alberto | Assistant Curator