Wanderings of Time

In the era of acceleration and transience, the idea of time has gained significant relevance in our everyday lives. In the realm of images, they offer us a window into an infinite territory, eternal return, linear progression, where chronological boundaries blur, and the past, present, and future intertwine in unexpected ways.

Georges Didi-Huberman argues that images have the ability to connect us with past or future moments, allowing us to experience a temporality different from the linearity of chronological time. He particularly emphasizes that when faced with an image, we are, first and foremost, confronting time itself. Images seem to evoke a sense of timelessness, allowing them to expand or even exist beyond the limitations of linear time.

In his project Past Continuous, Present Tense, Future Nostalgia, Nicolás Janowski proposes a process of cartographic construction, where mapping does not aim to visually represent a specific space but rather outline wandering drifts within the temporal dimensions of a territory: Saudi Arabia. He navigates aimlessly at the edges of time, like a tiny particle that, after entering the event horizon of a black hole, contemplates its surroundings timelessly, generating a counter-time, a counter-temporality.

This counter-temporality, therefore, implies the capacity to exist or act outside the limitations of linear time or established temporal conventions. It is not a denial of time but an abstraction to achieve a dislocation that allows images to solidify as fissures in history. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin addresses the idea that the past can manifest itself in the present in unpredictable and surprising ways. This approach, presenting a set of fleeting and fragmented past moments that can resurface in the present with new interpretations and meanings, leads us to position the idea of counter-time as a potentially enriching visual experience.

Through his images, Janowski seeks to capture suspended moments absorbed in counter-time, visual juxtapositions that challenge historical linearities to explore anachronistic scenes where elements from different unrelated moments converge and coexist in continuous harmonic tension.

This body of work presents spaces for a multidimensional approach, encompassing experiences of the past, present, and future within a single territory that twist, turn, reverse, or, to use an astronomical term, revolve.

De revolutionibus orbium coelestium – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres- presented the heliocentric theory that broke with the paradigm of the Earth as the center of the universe, which had prevailed for almost two thousand years. In May 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus revised and corrected the final version of his most important work, which would be printed later that same year, shortly after his death. The work dealt with the movement of the planets, those wandering stars, whose movement in the sky could not be precisely explained as they seemed to follow a certain pattern until they revolved, returned, performing a small loop backward before continuing on their original trajectory. Copernicus succeeded in explaining these revolutions by displacing our planet from the center of the universe, thereby generating what would later be called the Copernican Revolution, the beginning of the scientific revolution, and the origin of a new meaning for the word “revolution”: a profound change in a dominant structure.

Janowski finds spaces of revolution in counter-times; revolutions between chronological temporal dimensions. His photographs, like wandering planets, stray in temporality, creating loops that subvert a possible narrative consistent with our time. As Giorgio Agamben mentions, contemporary is the one who keeps his gaze fixed on his time to perceive, not its lights, but its shadows, and this is how Nicolás Janowski, with his unique contemplation of the territory, proposes erratic visual drifts that consolidate as temporal loops, as revolutionary wanderings of time.

Diego Vidart, Associate profesor at Universidad del Uruguay