The artists who challenge "chrononormativity" in a work at the Bienalsur
That people line up, as at the entrance to any other institution generated by modern bureaucracies , is part of the unusual ironies that art can generate, and does generate. Because this isn't just any institution, nor is it in just any building.
It is the Institute of Suspended Time , founded by the artists Raquel Friera and Xavier Bassas , and is located on the ground floor of the Muntref building, Contemporary Art Center, headquarters of the Hotel de Inmigrantes, and Kilometer 0 of Bienalsur.
"At the Institute of Suspended Time , we imagine ways to explode chrononormativity ," the authors present their unique work, which transcends both time and formats. The artists wait inside the gallery for the audience to enter.
The participants take their seats: "What is your relationship with time? Do you want to continue living like this?" With playful lucidity, the chronodiverse Friera and Bassas remind us, through questions, of what we have forgotten , or perhaps never knew: that the time we live in is nothing more than a convention , one that exploits and devours us, that subjects us to constant urgency.
Raquel Friera and Javier Bassas meet with viewers/patients in person at the Institute of Suspended Time's first physical location, MUSAC, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Castile and León.
Like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland , we race toward the system's productivity . Only art and humor, both carried out with the seriousness that children bring to their games (and Friera and Bassas at their Institute) can save us.
“Running out of time is a common experience in our societies,” the artists comment. It can connect, across any language or cultural boundaries, people from any point in the vast landscape that is Bienalsur, the transnational art biennial incubated by the Tres de Febrero National University, within whose framework the Institute is being presented for the first time in Buenos Aires.
With martial strategy, Spanish artists take the overwhelming language of bureaucracy (office with chairs and table, legislative codes, statutes, and, of course, clocks) to their advantage and subvert its meaning, denouncing the use and abuse of time and inviting us to experience it differently.
The ITS had its first physical location in MUSAC's Laboratory 987 (in León, 2021) and, later, in La Capella in Barcelona (in collaboration with the LOOP Festival, 2022) and in the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid.
In its spirit of reviving hierarchical structures and imposed logic, it is in tune with the biennial that hosts it in Buenos Aires, a promoter of contemporary humanism and a horizontal and independent territory for art.
From Marcel Duchamp to Julio Cortázar , they are illuminated by a genealogy of artists who resisted (and even emancipated themselves) from the logic of needles.
“The ITS is driven by Raquel Friera and Xavier Bassas, and made up of other “ accomplices ” – the manifesto states – who are spread across different parts of the institutional mechanism so that the gear, like that of a suspended clock, is and is not stuck, works and does not work. Like a tick-tock that only has the “tic” or the “tock” . Like a second hand that advances, stuck. Or like an hourglass in a poetic and controversial horizontal position.”
The Sleeping Theatre (El auditorio dormiente), a work by Camila Cañeque, an artist accomplice of the ITS.
The inevitable question, upon leaving the Institute of Suspended Time, will not be how long we will be able to live outside of time (that would imply the complete failure of the experiment). But how many of us there will be, on the other side of the clock.
Institute of Suspended Time (ITS) at Muntref - Immigrant Hotel Headquarters (Av. Antártida Argentina S/N, between the National Directorate of Migration and Buquebus) until September 7.
Clarin
