Rhea Dias

digtial photograph

 

For my semester project I explored the relationship between time and the Covid-19 pandemic, specifically how anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and isolation changed our perception of time. Through my work, I engaged with the concepts of time, escapement, and contemporaneity as explained and defined in the Raqs Media Collective reading “Now and Elsewhere” . The Raqs Media Collective writes that, “Time girds the earth tight. Day after day, astride minutes and seconds, the hours ride as they must, relentlessly... The soft insidious panic of time ticking away in our heads is syncopated by accelerated heartbeat of our everyday lives... Sleep is besieged by wakefulness, hunger is fed by stimulation, and moments of dreaming and lucid alertness are eroded with the knowledge of intimate terrors and distant wars” (Raqs Media Collective 1-2). But did time still “gird the earth tight” during the uncertain days of the pandemic? What about the isolation and fear that came with the lockdown? What of loved ones being carted away to hospitals? How did our “knowledge [of these] intimate terrors” contribute to “the soft insidious panic of time ticking away in our heads?”

The term escapement is defined as a “mechanism in mechanical watches and clocks that governs the regular motion of the hands through a ‘catch and release’ device that both releases and restrains the levers that move the hands for hours, minutes, and seconds” (Raqs Media Collective 2). The Raqs Media Collective likens escapement to the valves and chambers of the human heart which set the basic rhythm for our lives, regulating our body’s sense of time. They write that “Each heartbeat, each passing second marks the here and now, promises the future, and recalls the resonance of the last heartbeat. Our heart tells us that we live in time” (Raqs Media Collective 2). But the pandemic has changed our definition of escapement. How can each “passing second [mark] the here and now [and] promis[e] the future” when our hopes and dreams of the future are constantly threatened by Covid-19? On contemporaneity, the Raqs Media Collective writes that it is “the sensation of being in a time together... the tug we feel when our time pulls at us” (Raqs Media Collective 3). But how can we truly experience contemporaneity when the lockdowns of 2020 prevented us from existing in time together? And what about the isolation of the pandemic? The stress? The anxiety? Did it cause time to pull at us harder?

In my work, a multi-layered photography collage, I explored the Raqs Media Collective’s core concepts of time, escapement, and contemporaneity and their relationship to the warping of time during the Coronavirus pandemic by utilizing a grayscale color scheme, having the photographs all bleed into one another, and creating an overall sense of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and isolation. The piece is a reflection of the universal stress, grief, and temporal uncertainty that we as a world collectively experienced last year.