Built with Berta.me

  1. Placetime.

    As the title suggests, this project considers place and time. The title is an adaptation from the word spacetime, which in physics refers to theories that considers space and time to be a single, interwoven continuum- three dimensions of space, in addition to a fourth dimension of time. Place is space that has been shaped by human experience. 

    Place, therefore, cannot be separated from time and memory. It is inseparable from its position in the four dimensions of spacetime, and the memory of human experience is integral to its shaping out of space. Evidence also suggests that time does not travel at equal rates, making it possible that the past, present and future exist simultaneously, and are all as real as each other. If this is the case, every event that has, is or will ever take place in one point is happening there; with anything outside the present being inaccessible to us from our personal, isolated time frame - except through use of constructed narratives and imagination. For place to be truly considered then, its relationship to time, experience and memory of events should be taken into consideration.

    Through a visual and archaeological survey of one place, the project aims to create a new way of viewing place, taking into account its relationship with time. This work considers a place as being similar to a black hole: a dense depository of objects, signs and fragments isolated in time. From these objects, the mind constructs narratives of reality and history, building a universe within which we then place ourselves. This project aims to represent these constructions, as well as to explore them. 

    By treating photographs and found objects alike, considering them for their role as representations and prompts for construction and fiction, the work aims to question reality and perception, and representation itself. If reality and memory are constructions, then how should they be represented? And if they are constructions, are our representations in the present, involving fiction and construction, of things from other positions in space and time, any less valid than when they were perceived first hand?

    Perhaps the most accurate way of representing place is through re-presenting the representations it holds, and the photograph the most accurate at representing time- the Aeonic, everlasting, simultaneously existing moment. Fragments of objects and photographs highlight absence, and make aware the construction and fiction involved in the way they are perceived, and the way events are remembered, interpreted, experienced and re-experienced through re-presentation- a role integral to the photographic object itself.