The past, present and future are a trilogy of terms we hang our understanding of time upon. These fixed concepts of linear progression help us to measure journeys through events at both a local and universal scale. While these simplified labels help us understand the concept of time effectively, they don’t fully explain how we experience it. While we can use our senses to engage with most aspects of the world, what faculty do we use to gauge the passing of time?
The philosopher Henri Bergson split time into two categories: scientific and lived.1 The former quantifies time to allow shared understanding. Your 5 minutes is the same as mine. The latter is harder to determine but more in line with our experience. An hour on the bus at rush hour can feel infinitely longer than an hour at the pub. If we think of time in this purer sense, rather than its simplest, it starts to become less clear how we can explain it.
Within certain cultures, such as Australian Aboriginal, time is not viewed as sequential, but as cyclical and flexible. These sort of perspectives, which differ radically from a Western linear concept, are often misunderstood leading to warped interpretations. Readings of the Mayan calendar, which counts time differently to our current Western calendar, led to prophecies of a 2012 apocalypse which as far as we can tell, didn’t happen.
When looking into these pockets of history we have to consider who they were written by, for and sometimes against. Modern academia was built predominantly on the knowledge of wealthy, white Western men and often gives a leg up to exactly those people. In recent years moves to decolonise curricula have started to chip away at this dominance but even in the present, accounts can be warped. When writer Lola Olufemi headed an open letter to Cambridge University proposing more literature from the global south on the curriculum this was represented in the press as an attack on white authors.2 Often it is not a factual account that gets heard, but the loudest voice.
So how do we start to build a world where these misreadings and biases don’t exist? Is it through reappraising the past, building towards a better future or by imagining a timeless place where we can start all over again? The thinkers and makers here are producing work based on their own sense of time; readdressing histories, mining memories, speculating on the future and redefining the present. We invite you to move through an alternative sense of chronology, as you engage with works that exist simultaneously here, now and beyond in all directions.
- Henri Bergson, George Allen and Unwin, 1889, Time and free will : an essay on the immediate data of consciousness
- Jason Osamede Okundaye, The Guardian, 25 October 2017, The ‘decolonise’ Cambridge row is yet another attack on students of colour
