Opening: Friday, August 22th, 7 p.m “Welcome to the Institute of Suspended Time. We have long awaited this moment... When did you last seriously reflected on your relationship with time?” As a vehicle for theoretical investigation and artistic formalization, the IST seeks to suspend time, to denaturalise the temporal experience of the linear, chronometric, homogeneous, productive, and accelerationist time of our age. This is “the Western hour”. In short, it is about taking one more step forward on the path of artistic formats through an original approach to the politics of aesthetic practices: founding an institute, an anti-institute or a destitute to suspend the rhythms imposed by the era in which we live, neoliberalism. This means reclaiming the time expropriated by work-related stress (“Life isn't enough!”), false digital leisure (“this is how I unwind”), planetary extractivism (“mechanizing the living and the earth”), and by the family and social pressure that urges us “not to waste time”. As a pre-formatted temporal program designed to impose phases on our lives, every era and every society has its own chrononormativity: that set of implicit or explicit norms that imperatively punctuate our lives. The point is to understand that our way of experiencing time depends on a “temporal regime” that each era establishes as a form of power. The current regime is based on the productivity of economic, financial, and technological power. That is precisely what the IST is fighting against today.
Image: Institute of Suspended Time (IST)