Interview by Sara Giannini.
Raqs Media Collective is a Delhi-based artist collective who is committed to contemporary culture in all its facets. They are media practitioners, visual artists, curators and philosophers. Their wide range of work and practices is held together by a very subtle attention to the key issues of the contemporary age, from media and technology critique to a reflection upon multiculturalism and globalization. In occasion of the international symposium “Curating in Asia”, organized by the GAM project together with the Goethe Institute on December 9 and 10 2011, Raqs Media Collective performed the lecture-performance Timeliness. Speculating on the concept of “time”, the artists intertwined financial and political processes at work in capitalism with ontological issues related to ephemerality and permanence. In an untimely, Internet time-based discussion, I interrogated them on the meaning and the implications of simultaneity in the “global contemporary.” I am very grateful to Raqs Media Collective for the inspiring arguments they have shared with us.
Sara Giannini: You mentioned that the lecture-performance Timeliness was first conceived in the frame of the “Time/bank Platform,” a project initiated by e-flux “where groups and individuals can pool and trade time and skills.” Would you tell us more about the idea of employing time as a currency?
Raqs Media Collective: The idea of deploying time in terms of monetary value is not a new one, and is central to the ideas of ‘interest’ in finance and the debates around usury. Theologians of the School of Salamanca had to wrestle with the scriptural prohibitions around usury in the fifteenth century, and all modern theories of finance descend from their arguments.
Perhaps the “time is money” analogy stems from the notional scarcity of time in human life. And since anything scarce can be given value and monetized, time too can enter the matrix of human transactions as a unit of value and exchange. Two different ideas of currency can emanate from our considerations of the value of time, depending on whether we think of time as scarce, or as abundant. The time as scarce gives rise to a currency of time that is similar to money as we know it. And this leads to the notions of “saving,” “hoarding,” “wasting” and “spending” time. This notion emphasizes the value of a unit of time as an abstract entity, regardless of what the time is spent on.
SG: There is certainly an intimate connection between Timeliness and Escapement2, the work currently on show in the exhibition The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989. In both pieces imagination is meant as a way out from the tyranny of “this” time. How do you see the role of imagination after the much-proclaimed end of history?
RMC: The idea of “the end of history” was much proclaimed and subsequently, much pilloried idea. The “end of history” ended, because the static, turbulence-free world that it conjured has certainly not come to pass. As long as human beings are around to witness a succession of events, and as long as these events feature the push and pull of contrary forces and different desires, it is pointless to talk of an “end” to history. Curiously, the “end of history” thesis leaves no room for imagination as a motive force in human affairs. It presumes, that with things coming to a static resolution in human affairs, there is no more any need for people to imagine different outcomes to the processes that mark their lives. The fact that we are always imagining what else can happen, or how things can be different from what they are, suggests that imagination is a motor of change. As we know, time is an index of change. If things did not change, we would not have a sense of time. And without imagination, at least one of the engines of change is disabled. That is why imagination remains a motive force.
In Escapement, a discerning viewer will notice that three of the twenty-seven clocks run “mirror time.” These three clocks are tagged with labels that attach them to three imaginary cities, while the twenty-four other clocks describe the time you would find in twenty-four actually existing cities. It is as if the mirror time of the three imaginary cities offers an “escape” from a seeming eternity of the present, as described by clock time at any given moment by the twenty four other clocks. The imagination, by freeing us to inhabit the past, the future, or an alternative present, always incapacitates the vanity of the idea of the “end of history.”
SG: In your lecture you say “the city we live in lives in many times.” Could you explain that?
RMC: It just means that in Delhi, the city that we live, we can sometimes feel as if we live in the future, the present is always a crowded, proximate sensation and just around the corner, the twelfth, the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries stand embodied in a piece of architecture that may be a grand mausoleum or a modest tomb or gateway, and the nineteenth century, a casualty of war, is a haunting absence. We cannot avoid the push and pull of many times on a daily, hourly, moment by moment basis.
SG: Through the centuries, and perhaps in some residual forms still in the present, western anthropology and human sciences had comfortably cohabited with phylogenetic and ontogenetic theories; proclaiming that the multiplicities of human cultures were simultaneously living on different historical stages of development. What is the peculiarity of being contemporary in this world, today?
RMC: Being contemporary today means giving up the claim that there is any validity to a developmental telos that consigns some experiences in the present to what “has been exhausted” and the elevation of others to “things that we should all aspire towards.” The hierarchy of experiences can no longer be made subject to a fiction of chronological order. This does not mean that we do not inhabit different temporal registers; it is just that the contemporary condition takes us away from ranking these registers along a developmental axis. That modernist vanity is now behind us. The contemporary condition involves a more modest and at the same time more realistic assessment of our place(s) in time.
SG: You were co-curators of the 7th Manifesta in Bolzano in 2008. The next edition deals with “The Contemporary at the Service of the Past1”. How do you interpret the almost obsessive return of history in many contemporary art pieces?
RMC: Well, we are living in very strange times. We are living in the very beginning of the 21st Century, and the 20th Century was a heavy, heavy time. It was like 5 centuries in one. The 20th century is a century about pushing people in to oblivion. If you survive the 20th century, as all of us have, we are “survivors” of the 20th century, then I think you are in a condition where you really have to reflect on what happened. So it is not a surprise that a lot of contemporary art nowadays turns to history, deals with archives, investigation of memory and so on. This is perhaps a necessary task at the moment. It may not always be, but right now it seems like something we all need to be doing.
But it would be incorrect to say that this means that contemporary art is somehow in the thrall of the past. Any attempt to look outside the limitations of the present will take one in the direction of other possibilities. Here, the present is a reference, and the past, and the future, directions in which the outward gaze travels. The point is not that we are all fascinated by the past; rather it is that we are not blinded by the present. This leaves us all free to explore the record of times past as well as the dreams of times future. And these outward moves, in turn, allow us to look at the present. Because one can only look at the present as an object if one can position oneself away from it. Art, and the imagination provide us with the instruments of undertaking such a move.
SG: Timeliness made me think to the Lebanese writer Jalal Toufic. In his writings he says that nobody is really contemporary to her/his own time and there is always an “untimely collaborations” between thinkers and artists from different historical ages. Is there any form of untimely collaboration that affects your practice as contemporary artists?
RMC: We have many untimely collaborators. Our two great allies are memory and prophecy. And it doesn’t matter if the memory is weak and the prophecy is false, what matters is that we are always receiving transmissions from actors in plays that take place elsewhen and elsewhere. Myths, Science Fiction, obscure and commonplace historical references, folklore and conjecture – all these are our tools, and the makes of these tools are our untimely collaborators. We learn as much from medieval theorists and ancient epic poets as we do from twentieth century mathematicians, from nineteenth century radical political milieux as much as from early twenty first century software cultures, from mid twentieth century cinema and from our peers working in the world of contemporary art today. Our tastes, our curiosities, our drives are eclectic and take us in many different directions.
Footnotes:
1 Manifesta 9 coffee break: “The Contemporary at the Service of the Past”, (9-10.11.2011, Genk, Limburg, Belgium).
2 Visit the artists’ page on the “Global Contemporary” website: http://www.global-contemporary.de/en/artists/23-raqs-media-collective
