Counterclocks

The project has an online exhibition on counterclocks and queer temporalities based on input from the citizen humanities events and fieldwork as well as an engagement with environmental humanities literature on these matters. We are inspired by the work of the temporal belonings network. Pschetz & Bastian (2017) argue that time is designed, often according to dominant narratives that emphasis time as uniform, directional or as accelerating pace. However, time can be designed "as emerging out of relations between cultural, social, economic and political forces". We are following their work and exhibit alternative encounters of temporal relations - where time is explored as a network of activities, material and immaterial relations that fold out more dense and complex version of the world we live in. This is a way of asking questions about setting the priorities right - and for highlighting what takes our care time - and that alerts us to expect the unexpected.

We will both deal with temporal relations out in the landscape, such as at Gärstad, the incineration plant under study in the project Checking in with Deep Time and its relations, as well as the several counterclocks that can be found in museums as explored in the project Curating Time.

Incineration

Burning gabage transforms materials that come from several places around the globe and it reties their bonds to the planet and its climate. If this practice with its materialities is seen as a clock-site - it opens up for the need to tune in with what relations are formed in garbage futures - and how this activity designs time.

Storage

One effect of the garbage disposal and incineration is that it territorialises the future for many generations - not only in Sweden, but also abroad. The island Langøya recieves the longterm deposit of flyash from incineration - creates relationships with far futures - and thereby braids their time into ours.

Legacy

This is the heritage of Europe´s overconsumption, packed neatly in bales, gathered up in heaps, at some levels contained - but overflowing and overshooting in others.

Encounters with Deep Time

Where as overconsumption and garbage disposals make deep time interventions into far futures one can marvel on how history as a subject has focused mainly on humans. Just in front of the incinerator a rock protrudes, archaeology was once here. As Chakrabarty (2009) writes history need to take in deep time. This means that human history cannot be set apart from that called nature. These rocks have been around for millions of years and they are here and now interfingering with histories of today.

Hope and counterhope

In what Steffen calls the Traumascene - where all hope of environmental and climatological reconstitution might be gone - what are the prospects of hope - and what temporal relations does hope contain? Reading Miyazaki - hope is often connected with and sets up particula temporal relations, either with longings of going back to normality of progressing to a better future. But if the misery just continues (as written on this signpost outside Gärstadsverken) - what hope is there for hope?