BRAUDEL'S CLOCKS
clocks, 70x70cm and 120x70cm
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.