Ecole Mondiale : Fieldstation: Time (Inhabiting Time) 2018

 How do we inhabit time? Can time in time and over time be discovered? Fieldstation: Time is a nomadic artistic and pedagogical project entailing performances, actions, and discussions held over a five-day period in Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and Bucharest, following the route of the historic Orient Express that ran between Paris and Istanbul from 1883 to 1997. The research produced during this field trip serves the ongoing development of the Time Tool Box.

Ecole Mondiale: Time Tool Box 2018

The Time Tool box revisits the historical meeting of Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson in Paris in 1922, whose opposed views on time, demonstrate an ongoing tension between scientific time and time as experience. The Toolbox aims to explore this paradox, adding other models into the mix, based on a variety of philosophical, sociological and spiritual ideas on time.

The Tool box’s display format refers to the Japanese miniature street theatres called “Kamishibai”,  which in the past were often used for image-based storytelling with an educational or moral goal. On top of the Tool box stands a medium, which when it is moved, pulls out two different wires representing simultaneously the passage of time and its illusion.

Sand Carpet (Along the Antioxidant Express) – 2018

In re-enacting the route of the old Orient Express, Ecole Mondiale wants to revisit the train as a historic moment that promised a dream of open borders and free travel, while taking into account the strongly biased idea of ‘the orient’ and today’s changing relations between east and west. During their trip Ecole Mondiale developed different time-related activities. Each part of the program was site-specific and coordinated with various local communities, artists and organizations. The sand carpet (referring to Borges’ Book of Sand) shows a playful and ephemeral representation of Ecole Mondiale’s trip.

PHYSSANCE: entre moment et temps. 2018

Ecole Mondiale implements and performs the particular and mathematical calculations invented by Jean Katambayi. In this case he started thinking about that what is missing (‘ce qui manque’). It seems the world is always in search of that what is missing, today, but also things were missing in the past, and things will be missed in the future. What would happen if we confront this continuous missing with Newton’s laws of Physics? The resulting work represents a large and complex clock based on an algorithmic formula that comes out of Katambayi’s research and calculations. The algorithmic formula has been enacted during Ecole Mondiale’s journey.

ECOLE MONDIALE (EM): Sue Spaid, Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Filip Van Dingenen, Ive Van Bostraeten