Rewilding time
We are inviting you to join with us in an exploration of what it means to live in time, to be ‘time beings’, beings that live in and depend upon time.
This clay in front of us is pure potential – it could become anything.
By the end of this workshop we hope to have given it some life – that together we will have created a little ecosystem of what we are calling ‘time forms’ – think of them as beings that capture ways of living and being in time.
These can have any scale, shape or form.
Think how varied life forms are on the planet – from squid to giant redwood trees, to microbes and mountains, to ants nests and symbiotic . The time forms that you make here can be just as varied, they don’t need to take one shape.
We would like to invite you to stay silent during the next hour that we work together, to give yourselves space to sense in to these invitations and to your making.
Now, we are going to begin.
Working with clay
In this workshop, we invite participants to create ‘time beings’ from clay, and to experience what it is like to allow the end of the time being to come, confronting the realities of living in finite time.
The workshop has a number of different elements, including prompts that invite people to attend to the pace of their heart beat, to the moment in their lives where they experienced regular rhythms, to moments of slowness and speed, to times of disruption.
Contact us if you would like to learn more about this workshop or if you would like us to deliver the workshop for you.
Background
This workshop arose from a project ‘educating the temporal imagination’ that Keri developed with Penny Hay and Solveig Settemsdal. It was based on a letter (which you can read below) and developed through the dialogue between the three of us. It was also inspired by the work of Jan von Boeckel (whose brilliant clay workshops are powerful experiences).
From this — the workshop it evolved into a facilitation process that invites attention of participants to the different ‘shapes of time’ that they experience in their lives and to a visceral engagement with what it means to be a ‘time being’.
A letter to Solveig & Penny.
April 12 2022
Dear Solveig and Penny
I’m so sorry I haven’t sent this letter till now – it’s been a mad old few weeks …
Is this perhaps one of the first places to start our thinking about time and learning? Something about the ongoing experience of time as lived in haste, in speed, in acceleration – about the experience of time as a limited resource, as something that is constantly used up, something that we don’t have enough of. What does this do to our experience of life, this sense of pressure and limits???
I’ve been very interested recently in the book by Isabelle Fremeux and Jay Jordan called ‘We are nature defending itself’ and their idea of the importance of both ‘the no and the yes’ – and I’ve also adapted this to think about the ‘how’ as well.
What they mean by this - is the importance both of naming what you are against as well as exploring what you are for. They draw on the zapatista idea of ‘one no, many yeses’ – to foreground the fact that there may be a shared agreeement on what is wrong (the no) that can act as the basis for a creative flowering of what might be right or at least, offer an interesting avenue for experimentation.
So, perhaps I’ll start with the ‘no’ that I feel right now in relation to time, schools, young people, climate.
The no that I can feel, in my body, is:
No to the organisation of time in school that creates the experience of living where time is seen as a threat, is used as a punishment, is treated as jail time, is seen as measurable in just one way, is assumed to be experienced in the same way by everyone, is used as a resource and a way of exercising power over others. I’m thinking here of Charlie Chaplin in the cogs in the film ‘Modern Times’ – the cogs of the machine, the wheels of the clock. No to the quantification of time that means we can say future time has less value than time in the present, no to the discounting of future time embedded in the algorithms of insurance and stock markets. No to the dematerialisation of time as fantasy – of futures imagined as separated from the lived experience of time in bodies and worlds.
Yes, to seeing time as relationship, as a way of coordinating and connecting, to time as personal, distinctive, taking different shapes and flavours and colours for each person, to time as precious, to each moment as distinctive and to time as life, eccentric, unfolding, taking new forms.
What are the metaphors or images we might use to think of time as life. To help us see time as organic and imaginative, to recognise that we are constantly, messily, time-travelling, pulling in memory and imagining futures, in every instance and each interaction wehave with each other and with the world.
Yes, to seeing time as coordination – of agreement – of deciding to make connections.
Yes, to seeing experienced time as finite – to facing the reality of death, of the ending of our times.
Yes, to seeing our time in connection with wildly divergent times – our time in relation to the shimmer of light on water, in relation to the deep slow movements of plate tectonics, in relation to the bubbling of methane in the permafrost.
Yes to seeing the connection between our times and the times of past and future generations, to feeling in our bodies and in our lives, the times of past generations and to seeing in the spring each season, the coming of new generations. Y
es to recognising that we do live with ghosts and futures yet to come, all the time, that they interrupt and disrupt our day to day lives.
Yes, to an abundant perception of time, sprawling, messy, resistant to control. What happens when we start our thinking and living from that perspective?
And then the how, the so-what, the how might the yes come into being? For me, this means – first, coming to know and experience the many different ‘habits’ of time, the different forms that living in time, being a ‘time being’ might take. And then, beginning to unpick the habits of clock time, gently – what might it mean to try to coordinate in different ways? What happens if we coordinate around tasks not clockhands? And then, perhaps, thinking about how to bring different conceptions of time to bear on the way we are framing our problems, our decisions – what happens if we see time as a set of different lenses/relationships that we bring into a conversation, that allow us to draw attention to and foreground different aspects. So – could we imagine a ‘time clinic’ – where we bring problems and think about them from the perspective of different timescales? Could we imagine a ‘time council’ where different temporalities and ways of htinking about time are brought to bear on issues we have to make decisions about? Wales has a minister for future generations? This is attempting to disrupt short term thinking – perhaps there are other temporalities that we might also want to bring into dialogues and discussions?
Could we work with children in schools to play with these ideas of time, to see how they might be brought to bear on problems they are facing, to see what happens when they work with different conceptions of time in their lives and their schoolwork? What might we do together with them? Should we have a workshop with young people to explore all of this, in July? In September? (at that point, I hit the temporality of our project budget which says all has to be invoiced for before the end of July.. and I start thinking about howt o work around this – about time-hacking…)
This is enough for now – enough to start a conversation I hope. I look forward to seeing your responses, and to responding to you both soon.
Keri x