WHAT THE TORTOISE MURMURS TO ACHILLES On Laziness, Economy of Time, and Productivity March 18 – May 8 2016 Opening: March 17, 6pm SAVVY Contemporary Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin Artists: Salwa Aleryani, Nidaa Badwan, Atef Berredjem, Raphael Cuomo & Maria Iorio (+Videobase), Cevdet Erek, Abrie Fourie, Katia Kameli, Brandon Labelle, Abraham Onoriode Oghobase, Junebum Park, Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger Curators: Elena Agudio, Saskia Köbschall, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung In Lewis Carroll’s 1895 What the Tortoise Said to quences of our ubiquitously consumerist lives. The Achilles1, a fictitious dialogue between the two prota­ market sets the pace of our quotidian. It pushes us gonists of Zeno’s Paradox, the slow and clever tor toise into over­activity, eroding forms of community and presents Achilles with a syllogism that brings him into a damaging the fabric of everyday life. In our current logical trap and leads him into an infinite regression. tremendous condition of non­time in the reign of 24/7 capitalism, Alexei Penzin, whose work focus­ The exhibition project What the Tortoise murmurs to es on sleep in the age of capitalism, writes: “Our Achilles. On Laziness, Economy of Time and Produc- 24­hours­society with its incessant production, com­ tivity is a bid to investigate alternative understandings munication and consumption activities makes sleep and perceptions of time from a pluricultural and deco­ a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, lonial perspective by digging into the politics of time just wasted time or inertia in a mobile and pragmatic and of its negotiations in geopolitical power relations. neoliberal society obsessed with the idea of the full This project cannot afford the luxury to stand as a employment of finite human existence.”3 simple praise of idleness or a superficial claim on the right to be lazy; rather, the exhibition will be a concep­ tual and physical space for reflections on chronopoli­ tics and on the power mechanisms that frame certain Radical Co-presence and the Subversiveness rhetorics of time economy. That is to say, the exhibi­ of Non-linear Temporalities tion will take its cue from the assumed and connotated ‘slow’ and ‘disruptive’ rhythm associated with “South­ Walter Benjamin quotes reports that during the Paris Com­ ern” attitudes as a position of resistance to the pur­ mune, in all corners of the city of Paris there were people ported industrious nature of The Protestant Ethic and shooting at the clocks on the towers of the churches, pal­ the Spirit of Capitalism, as Max Weber once titled.2 aces and so on, thereby consciously or half­consciously ex­ pressing the need that somehow time has to be arrested; The perverse cult of labour enshrined by the Euro­ that at least the prevailing, the established time continu­ pean civilization and glorified by the Enlightenment um has to be arrested, and that a new time has to begin. enterprise is currently showing the nefarious conse­ (Herbert Marcuse, 1967)4 1 The first condition for post­abyssal thinking is radical And he follows that co­presence. Radical co­presence means that practices and agents on both sides of the line are contemporary in equal In African thought, the Sasa ‘swallows’ up what in western terms. Radical co­presence implies equating simultaneity or linear concept of time would be considered as the future. with contemporaneity, which can only be accomplished if Events (which compose time) in the Sasa dimension must the linear conception of time is abandoned. be either about to occur, or in the process of realization, or (Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2007)5 recently experienced.11 An overwhelming need to once and for all silence In his essay Accommodating Time – Confidence and the relentless ticking of the clock that structures life Trust in African Everyday Life Elisio Macamo denotes and demands nonstop productivity overcame protest­ accommodating time as a form of everyday resis­ ers who rushed to the streets to destroy all of Paris’ tance and taming everyday life (a very patient form of church tower clocks during the time of the radical subversion). He goes on to include Mbiti’s distinction socialist government that ruled the city in 1871. The “between ‘Sasa’ – the Kiswahili term for the immediate clock, as the epitome of the Western notion of time as past, i.e. the time defined by the ancestor spirits which linear, constant and irreversible, had to be destroyed, can be remembered by living people – and ‘Zamani’ – as a challenge to the notions of progress, economic the distant past peopled by those ancestor spirits productivity, and work ethics that are intimately linked remembered by no one.”12 Sasa and Zamani are not to the idea of linear temporality. stages of death. They are the two ontological stages (or dimensions) of history, two aspects of time: With the conception of a “universal time” during the Renaissance and the invention of the concept of the Zamani is not limited to what in English is called the past. new world, both space and time were colonized, as (…) Zamani overlaps with Sasa and the two are not sep­ Walter Mignolo aptly described.6 Since then, time has arable. Sasa feeds or disappears into Zamani. But before functioned as a system of subordination, relegating events become incorporated into the Zamani, they have to places and people to “below” or “before” from the van­ become realized or actualized within the Sasa dimension. tage point of the “holders (of the doors) of time.”7 Time When this has takenplace, the events “move” backwards became the benchmark for the order of knowledge, from the Sasa into the Zamani. (…) It is the final storehouse creating hierarchies by arranging events and people in for all phenomena and events, the ocean of time in which a “timeline” and thus also working at the very heart of everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither the colonial enterprise, as conceptions of time created after nor before.13 a gap of temporality between the colonizer and the “Other,” i.e. a colonial chronology of difference. In his seminal essay Beyond Abyssal Thinking, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues for the aban­ It is thus crucial to re­imagine a concept of time that donment of the linear conception of time in order to exists beyond the confines of a linear, mono­direc­ achieve “radical co­presence,” a condition in which tional construction of the present, past, and future; “practices and agents on both sides of the line are to propose a sense of temporality that allows for and contemporary in equal terms.”14 This research and accommodates fluidity of and in time. This notion is exhibition project brings together diverse artistic posi­ in line with many non­Western conceptions of time. tions in order to explore “radical co­presence” of differ­ For example, some of the Maori philosophies of time ent temporalities and conceptions of time, disrupting operate on the basis of “walking backwards into the the chronopolitics of straight temporality by shedding future while reviewing our past.”8 From a Caribbean light on the entanglements of notions of time, ideas perspective, Édouard Glissant describes the construc­ of productivity (laziness), and spatio­temporal hierar­ tions of temporality and the “persistence in consider­ chies that continue to shape our present. ing time in terms of natural experience” as a reflection of a “general instinctive response against the ambition of imposing a ‘single’ historical time.”9 The Politics of Laziness With regard to the many different African understand­ ings and conceptions of time, John Mbiti argued that The native’s laziness is the conscious sabotage of the co­ contrary to Western teleological temporalities – which lonial machine; on the biological plane it is a remarkable are mostly focused on the future under which History system of auto­protection; and in any case it is a sure brake could be taken to its logical conclusion – African time upon the seizure of the whole country by the occupying instead highlights the importance of the present. It is power. (…) The duty of the native who has not yet reached intimately cyclical, not linear, and is backward­looking maturity in political consciousness and decided to hurl back instead of forward­looking as Mbiti has shown in his oppression is literally to make it so that the slightest gesture study of the concepts of Sasa and Zamani whereby has to be torn out of him. (Frantz Fanon, 1963)15 “Sasa has the sense of immediacy, nearness, and ‚now­ness‘; and is the period of immediate concern for Laziness, sleepiness, and indolence have often, from the people, since that is ‘where’ or ‘when’ they exist.”10 a Western perspective, been historically associat­ 2 ed with vicious behaviors and negative habits, and tive. Waste of time thus becomes “the first and in prin­ further, with peripheral, suburban, and Mediterranean ciple the deadliest of sins” and “loss of time through and Southern attitudes. Since the Neolithic revolu­ sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than tion, when farming became the major sustenance is necessary for health, six to at most eight hours” for mankind, industriousness and productivity, too, becomes subject to “absolute moral condemnation.”22 became an obligation for human beings16, degenerat­ The lazy human body refusing to be “productive,” or ing in time until the contemporary compulsory routines accused of not being productive, is thus a contested of our technological culture. Hunter­gatherers, like and ideologically charged site of discourse; laziness is most predatory animals17, are said to be essentially coined the ‘mother of all vices’ and intricately epito­ ‘lazy,’ as their work aims solely at satisfying their basic mizes the flipside of a world whose utmost virtue is hunger.