“Revolutions have always been revolutions against time”
– Walter Benjamin
1.
Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido is founded at a precise moment in a precise time, under what is known as neoliberalism, but it comes from so far in the past and concerns the future so much that its foundation is inside and outside of time, suspended.
2.
Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido is founded in a precise location, MUSAC in León, but it belongs to both here and there, to all and none of its headquarters, in such a way that its location is inside and outside of the exterior and interior space of each person, suspended.
3.
Instituto de Tiempo Suspendido is an institute, but also an anti-institute and a destitute. It is an institute because it seeks to endow itself with strength and presence within society, similar to other existing institutes. But it is simultaneously an anti-institute because it wants to maintain its strength and social presence without the institutional logic of hierarchy and control of life. It is also a destitute because it promotes the dismissal of all positions.
4.
As an institute, anti-institute and destitute founded within and outside of time and space, the ITS promotes the introduction and spread, by all possible and, above all, impossible routes, of suspended time in each of our lives and in society. Putting life at the centre, as they say, is putting suspended time at the centre of our lives.
5.
The ITS understands suspended time in infinite ways, but always and in all cases indicating ways of living time that respond to chrononormativity. Current chrononormativity is based on a linear, homogeneous, neutral, quantitative, telic, productivist conception of time: those strenuous and mechanical rhythms that are sold as necessary and natural. The ITS is aimed, therefore, at the reappropriation of time expropriated, stolen and lost by all the practices that reduce the constitutive
chronodiversity of beings (humans, plants, animals): we are, all of us, times.
6.
The foundation of the ITS is conceived in an undisciplined way in two senses; as an act of disobedience in the face of temporal disciplinarisation and also as a way that deconstructs disciplinary boundaries. Somewhere between what is usually called contemporary art, philosophy, politics and poetry, the ITS is also part of the performing and literary arts, psychology and psychoanalysis and (anti) psychiatry, sociology and anthropology and historiography, in music and musicology, etc. The ITS not only intends to cross these disciplines, to summon them by blurring them, but also to alter their formats.
7.
The ITS is made up of “accomplices”, since belonging to it does not constitute a relationship between the members and a whole, but of a singular and vital commitment to a plan whose execution consists in the suspension of every plan and of every execution in its “chrononormative” sense (see article 1 above).
8.
The ITS is promoted by Raquel Friera and Xavier Bassas, and made up of other “accomplices” who are distributed in different places of the institutional mechanism so that the gear, like that of a suspended clock, is and is not stuck, it works and it does not work. Like a tick-tock that only has the “tick” or the “tock”. Like a second hand that runs aground. Or like an hourglass in a poetic and controversial horizontal position.
9.
The ITS organises (dis)agreements, disassemblies, batches, wanderings and other potential (in)activities whose very organisation and development is already a practice of chrono-diversity and a trial of suspended time.
10.
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