Opening: April 6, 18:00
April 07 – May 19, 2024

Ausstellungsraum Klingental
Kasernenstrasse 23
4058 Basel-CH

What to do with our time? The sound artist Lain Iwakura and the visual artist Jeronimo Voss take experiences of the everyday lack of time as an opportunity to experiment beyond the Universal Standard Time (UTC). Against the scarcity of monochronic, linear time, against the increasing end-time jargon in politics and the media, they set the real potential surplus of polychronic time. The focus is on polyrhythmic experiments, hallucinogenic machines and anarchist clockmakers. For this project, they invite different perspectives to an assembly and spatial installation of time-based media - against the clock.

ATC is an audiovisual installation and parallel history. The historical starting point are the momentous labor strikes of Jurassian watchmakers in the 1870s. This decade in the Saint-Imier valley was marked by the simultaneous expansion and devaluation of female wage labor in the clockmaking industry, as well as their labor disputes and strikes. While the timeline familiar to us was shortly thereafter fenced into a history of male-dominated trade unions, class compromises and the enforcement of universal standard time, ATC attempts to trace a different development, up to a point that is in some ways comparable to our present and at the same time fundamentally different.

In this other reality, Uchronia may have begun as a utopia, as a non-place, until it was replaced by the practice of clockmakers who no longer wanted to be clockmakers. Uchronia here refers to the striking clockmakers' turning away from the monochronic ticking of state-economic modernity towards an open future. From then on, they deal with intrinsic times and the polyrhythms of their environment, with resonance, vibration and sonic bodies. In the process, they create devices that do not convey a supposedly neutral clock hour or standard time, but rather spatio-temporal relationships, messages, plans, decision-making processes, poetry, emotions, touches and sounds.

In ATC, contradicting understandings and politics of time collide. As an uchronic alternative ATC does not exist in a merely hopeful future, not like the familiar sustainability imagery from solar-punk to eco-modernism. Instead it exists in a parallel time position that, in a change of perspective, raises fundamental questions about technology, class and environmental conditions of our own present.

ATC is based on an exchange between the sound artist Lain Iwakura and the visual artist Jeronimo Voss. In their practice of time-based media, both deal with questions of the production, organization, handling and overcoming of time. The installation will be complemented by various interventions over the course of the exhibition. Contributing guests are: Soland Angel, Aaron Benanav, Alberto Ricca *Bienoise, Peter Kradolfer *Wanja, Antonia S. Manhartsberger, Iulia-Andreea Smeu *Kite