Unsinging Linear Time (On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors)

First intended as a performative conference, On Enclosed Spaces and the Great Outdoors - 4. Grounding has been reworked into a series of radio contributions that will be streamed in three parts from Kaaitheater.

We live in an age in which human activity has a profound impact on our physical and ecological surroundings. How can we create stories, aesthetics, and spaces of experience to deal with this situation reflexively and critically? What role can the performing arts play in the debate on climate crisis?

What remains of the theatre as we know it when its walls crumble and the outside world creeps in? When formulating this question over a year ago, little did we know it would be overtaken by reality in unexpected ways. The covid pandemic has made some uncanny aspects of the climate crisis into an acutely felt reality. Events, lifeforms and entanglements beyond our control have entered not only the theatre, but our familiar environments of life and work. Confusion, constraint, vulnerability and grief have mingled with emergent ecosystems and the prospects of organizing the world differently. Where can we – artists, researchers, citizens – find a ground to land given this situation?

Ingrid Vranken, Gosie Vervloessem, Mathieu Charles, Rodrigo Batista, Nahuel Cano, Mihaela Brebenel, Rasa Alksnyte and Mayfield Brooks – Unsinging linear time

‘Unsinging linear time’ is a collective reflection on the violence of the linear understanding and experience of time that defines Western societies. Time understood as an unstoppable train, driving from the past into the future. Many cultures and thinkers however describe time as thick and layered, circular or branching off into parallel timelines. We propose to think of linear time as a colonial psychological violence. Is a decolonisation of the mind possible by unsinging ourselves from linear time? In Unsinging linear time, Ingrid Vranken, Gosie Vervloessem, Mathieu Charles, Rodrigo Batista, Nahuel Cano, Mihaela Brebenel, Rasa Alksnyte and Mayfield Brooks present an open glossary of reflections on time, and how a different experience of time could responsibilize us towards the human and more-than-human world.

https://www.kaaitheater.be/en/agenda/on-enclosed-spaces-and-the-great-outdoors-4-grounding