Bending time: Nonlinear time in conversations, reflections and practice

Abstract

This master thesis delves into speculative, non-linear conceptualisations and embodied experiences of time. It explores how bending time away from linear, progressive, homogenous and unidirectional flow can serve as an avenue for reinvigorating hope, agency and solidarity. The thesis proposes a methodology of ‘time-bending’: a framework for recognising non-linear, irregular and multidirectional movements of time as a way of seeing possibilities for alternative world building, which is to say, for alternative futures in the present.

My approach appreciates the entanglements of temporality, agency, language and materiality. It asks: Can a decolonial, multispecies, locally-rooted and nonlinear understanding of time enliven our agencies, and offer us tools for imagining and enacting a more complex, collective and ethical world-making? This inquiry is approached through a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on fields ranging from posthumanism, feminist theory, curatorial studies, queer ecology, new materialism, social sciences, biology, literature studies and more.

This thesis is a part of a larger and ongoing artistic/curatorial research into the transformative potential of a practice-with-time, which combines conversations, personal reflections and theory. The conversations were held with various practitioners across art, science, activism or academia, and centred around the topics of time, social change, organisation, solidarity, multispecies worldmaking and futuring. These interviews are still ongoing, and will eventually materialise in a publication that would feature seven of these in total. For the purposes of this thesis, I am presenting excerpts from two of these conversations. Apart from these excerpts, the thesis also weaves in a visual imaginary of time in the form of various sketches and images that exemplify different ways of sensing and understanding time. They, sometimes directly and sometimes more loosely, reflect or expand on the themes discussed in the text.

Keywords: time, temporality, futuring, ecology, placemaking, speculative practice, decolonial time, commoning, non-linearity, embodiment, nonhuman, agency.