— epilogue: about time —
Throughout this thesis, with few exceptions, I have deliberately left aside the reflection and research on time as another fundamental and proper element of the constitution of an identity, of the location of a space and that has a close and very direct relationship to what human beings do, not only from the perspective of what is happening in the present, but also adding what different cultures have understood in the same space.
This decision has been taken with a lot of conscience and only with the purpose of delimiting the possibilities and potential aspects to be approached within the same work-project. This also goes hand in hand with the consideration that time (or rather duration) is not a predominant factor for the premise from which this work is standing from (my relationship with the social outbreak in Chile).
However, opening the potential of this project towards understanding the temporal dimension of space seems to be an obvious future step – even fundamental if we want to talk about understanding space in modern philosophy and sciences – as it is a direct aid to the sensible characterisation of a spatial identity: be it a specific place or any other complex dimension of human identity.
For this development of time as a definition of what we can understand by space, starting from reading authors such as Martin Heidegger or extracting the consequences of Einstein’s relativity of time becomes a priority as the artistic application can help to understand some of the most important phenomena of the understanding of reality as a sensitive experience that is as subjective as it is infinite.
There is a quote that I like very much from the Uruguayan writer, historian, journalist and poet Eduardo Galeano which is “I was a lousy student of history. History classes were like visits to the Wax Museum or the Region of the Dead. The past was still, hollow, mute.” It is a critique of the past as something immobile: a place whose study is for resignation, for acceptance, he would say.
I say this, because a place where precisely the temporal dimension seems to be one of its most important qualitative faces are the museum-memorials. Spaces where shock and awe, where stupor and intimate aesthetic sensibility are deeply linked to atrocious events that humanity strives hard to maintain and sustain as part of its narrative truth.
French philosopher, mathematician and poet Gaston Bachelard, in his analysis of Roupnel’s work “La Siloé”, fought passionately for his philosophy of time understood as instants that once apprehended by human rationality will be united in the memory of individuals. In his postulate, Bachelard also fought against the resignation of past times to explain the present: in his theory, studying the present is the fundamental task of time-study to give life and relevance to our pasts and futures.
I believe that studying this dimension is a particularly fertile opportunity for the development of multimedia art with a political perspective of current societies, since the same process that I have developed throughout my thesis to connect distant physical spaces can be applied with the help of technology to connect spaces that temporarily seem distant to generate a closeness, a sensitivity and understanding of human history from feeling ourselves in the present, heirs of a history to rescue and bearers of creativity to build a different future.