'Time Keepers' by Johanna Odersky

About

A Song for Iku:

Thoughts whirl out of control—perfectly shaped circles carved off-center make me wonder what holds me in place. I try to imagine the cosmos entirely; fail and remember your body is my body.

Longitudinal grids spiral into each other. Are they silent sound waves turning and turning? Will they crash and splinter or merge smoothly like clouds?

Concentric circles curl into landscapes out of the frame while I feel a slight thump on my chest.

I know that “change requires forgetting”[1]and the feeling of loss I always bring along makes itself comfortable on the floor. A spot is left blank and I feel the silence. Cut sound “constitutes a kind of promise.”[2]

I want a map that tells me what and how I felt when and why.

Time Keepers offers insight into the process of representing memory. Similar to how a partiture abstracts sound through signs, the exhibited artworks condense duration into color. The affective registers attached to specific memories are transmuted into haptic scores that invite a transformative awareness of time.

Everything changes, nothing stays put and this is called hope. Your eyes widen and the map of our memories “is not a stable representation of a more or less unchanging landscape.”[3]The ground was always porous.

I look again and try to locate the knot growing at my navel. It slowly grows at an angle hiding under folds of skin while “‘naked flesh is bound.”[4]

The temporal dimension of affect is the substance of Time Keepers. These cartographies of inner experience co-exist—as in memory—through their unmeasurable mutuality and mutability, which reminds me how the color wheel feels vast like water: cyclical and repetitive yet timeless.

You are on the move again. The wind ruffling your feathers fills the room.

Are you feeling free today?

Is time clipping your wings afresh?

I pour an ocean onto the map with one immortal hand behind my back

while the other writes songs you forgot.

A ring inside a ring welds the thought crust of our memories together.

Alone in the unriddled sea, we forget our secrets and seduce our sorrows.

José B. Segebre

[1]Catriona Mortimer-Sandlands, “Landscape, Memory, and Forgetting: Thinking Through (My Mother’s) Body and Place,” in Material Feminisms ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 282.

[2]Carlos Basuado, “Score,” in In Terms of Performance. ed. Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincol (Berkeley: Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, 2016), Accesed August 23, 2020: http://intermsofperformance.site/keywords/score/carlos-basualdo.

[3]Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 7.

[4]Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 7.