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 Beatrice Tulagan:

Beatrice Tulagan is a Filipina artist, climate justice organizer, and the founder of tala storytelling collective. She explores the personal as inevitably political amidst the climate crisis, social shocks, and power grabs, suggesting tender wayfindings and collective endurance. Her artistic and movement practice weaves poetry, sound, performance, participatory installations, and experience design.