BRAUDEL'S CLOCKS
Chromalux print on aluminium, UV print on acrylglass, custom-made, rotating aluminium and steel clock mechanism.
Series of 15, various dimensions, 2022 - ongoing.
It is 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday Clock. In the past years, filled with dramatic social, political, and environmental changes, everyone’s attention was directed to the well-known indicator of humanity’s vulnerability to catastrophe.
Founded by Albert Einstein in 1945, the Doomsday Clock inevitably moves its hands closer to midnight every year. It is a potent metaphor, but of course, the actual state of the planet cannot be measured by one linear time. As revolutionary 20th-century historian Fernand Braudel noticed, the idea of unified time is a social construct, and the world is a complex set of structures evolving at various speeds. Each system, structure, social group, human or non-human entity has its own time and pace, entangled into one world of different time scales.
Braudel’s Clocks is a body of work consisting of a series of digital prints set into a movement resembling that of the hands of a common clock. Each object consists of round layers of Chromalux prints on aluminum and semi-transparent UV prints on glass, joined together by a clock mechanism. Each layer moves at a different speed—measuring seconds, minutes, or hours, sometimes counterclockwise. The layers depict motifs related to technological phenomena, human and non-human imagery, and micro- and macro-universes.