W again, yeah, you missed an unload!
Understandably so since we were both away without internet last week but still, sunday is sunday, so we’ll discuss what do do with that later. Anyway, now it’s my time again so lets talk about that; Time.
Time is super weird, because it’s always a little bit more personal than it seems to be. Some people say that time does not exist but I disagree. Seconds, minutes, hours and weeks are man made, they don’t really exist, sure. But time itself, days, years and just the difference between now and now, that’s real. But not even entirely, since your place and speed in the universe can change not only how you perceive time, but even how you actually experience it.
Back to last week were I was working on a piece of performance art based around time. And like usual, my fascination for “nothing”, the absent and the impossibility showed itself... I got fascinated by the concept of “lost time”.
Since you can talk about lost times, you can feel like you’ve lost time. But if you thing about it, you cant really LOSE time. But you can forget and you can supplant your memories. Losing time also implies something else, it implies that you once had it. Lost times aren’t missed times. Lost times are the times you felt like you had a grip on but did not. this can be in the form of memories, or chances.
So if you can’t really lose time, but still can feel like you did, so were does that time go? Well... I started to collect it. My performance became me sitting at a table to have a chat with whoever came to sit opposite me. And I would tell them that I collected lost time, since lost implies it still being somewhere, lost is not gone... And than I’d ask them what time they lost. And whatever they told me I wrote down on a paper and folded in half twice, I put it in an envelope which I sealed and wrote there name and the date on the outside.
But before I placed the envelope on the pile of envelopes with names and dates next to me I’d ask them: “now the choice is yours, do you want it back?”.
The results were so fascinating, the things people said, and the things people decided. Some people took there time back, but most people let me keep it. Some people thought for minutes, and some people changed there minds.
A few people cried and lots of people thanked me.
And while I started the performance with the idea of a fictive figure who collects lost time, halfway trough there was nothing fictional about it any more. I had become the lost time collector. And you know what... I like it, so much so that I’ll defeatedly will continue doing this and collect lost time from people.
And finally, I’ll try not to lost to much time doing so.
W.
