Anna,

I want to lay out my perception of time to you. In the first place I am sending not to someone inside the theatrical art world because my interest lies in the life-perception of time. And in the second place I am sending it to you because you are the closest person to time that I know. I admire your relationship towards time.

Our (as in generally speaking) concept towards time lies mostly in our relationship towards it. We take time and we give it. We wish we had more. We make it into this living creature that is leading us by the hand. It creeps, flies and stands still. We treasure time and it is cruel to us, we keep it and we kill it. As long as we do not try to analyse it we now what it is. All this puts expectation in this concept. We are lived by time because we are temporal but it is ours. Our time is our own. Though we love nothing more than to share it. The importance of an object/event/person is almost measured in the time we give to it. And since sharing is almost made to easy by media it is maybe even denying us the pleasure of giving someone or something our time. And maybe this is where art finds its way in.

If you see art, you see time. A time based visual language that without it existing in a certain moment of sharing, does not exist. The time that it takes to make a piece, the time that it refers to, the times in which it is shown, the time afterwards and the times it comes back in your memory. The investment in the event and the reactional time platform it creates. On a side note: this is maybe why I don’t believe in the contemporary. To a critical eye everything is placed in the importance of its time. And perhaps it is the duration of the event that matters most. The visual timeframe of the event shown and the time that it takes to exist in your thoughts.

As I am writing you this email Anna (my sister), I am wearing your scarf. The one you wanted to through away but not before you showed it to me. You thought I did not want to have it but still you kept it to show to me. For me this scarf is the embodiment of time. It refers to a time in which you bought it. I can see the situation before my eyes. For me it is this symbol of recognition of all the times you wore it. The wear on the object reminds me of how long you wore it, I remember the scarf in that way as part of you. I can see you  playing with Noud in it, putting it on again and again, walking our dog that now no longer lives. It reminds me of time spend together but also as it being a part of your life that  I was not part of. The embodiment of time. For me it is a personal object. It not only refers to all this time past but also the time in which I am going to wear it, now and maybe tomorrow and after a long time I will find it forgotten somewhere in the closet just to remind me again. But to the outside eye this is just a scarf. If you might pay attention you would see that it is old, that I treat it with care, only wear it sometimes, that is had a life. But all the qualities of this scarf are exactly the tools that art can play with. The physicality of time. A shared object that grows with the importance you agree it has. And that is how I see time scenographically. Giving a shared platform in time for the creation of an event that can last far longer than it physically does and communicates through this shared recognition of importance. Creating a time symbol in the now and for the time to come.  

liefs,

Nina