Many of us occupy bodies that break cishetero patriarchal, racist, imperialist, and ableist interpretations of time. Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said coined the term “rival geography” to describe liminal spaces as sites of resistance to colonial occupation. In Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie M. H. Camp expands on the concept of rival geographies to explicitly include landscapes of Black fugitivity. With their work Said and Camp challenge us to center our liminal experiences as “rivals” not “alternatives” to whiteness.
Through crafting a practice that mixes media and material language In These Times asks us to view time as varied, shifting, and nonlinear. We don’t have to wonder what it might be like to move beyond chronological time because we already do. We live not only in backwards and forward accelerations, but abrupt stops, long loops, elastic skips, and slow drags. We collapse ancestral timelines in our bodies. We invoke pasts, presents, and futures each time we pray. We disrupt the urgency of capitalism when we practice community care.
In short, I believe that time is messy. And that’s a good thing.
In These Times Level Ground Syllabus Project
Through crafting a practice that mixes media and material language In These Times asks us to view time as varied, shifting, and nonlinear. We don’t have to wonder what it might be like to move beyond chronological time because we already do. We live not only in backwards and forward accelerations, but abrupt stops, long loops, elastic skips, and slow drags. We collapse ancestral timelines in our bodies. We invoke pasts, presents, and futures each time we pray. We disrupt the urgency of capitalism when we practice community care.
In short, I believe that time is messy. And that’s a good thing.
In These Times Level Ground Syllabus Project
Bianca Nozaki-Nasser is a Los Angeles (Tongva land) based multimedia artist. Born to a Syrian-Lebanese father and Japanese American mother, much of her work draws on her own experience navigating familial legacy, transnational culture, material language, and the politics of artifacts. Bianca is also the Strategy & Creative Director at 18MR, a national digital-first Asian American advocacy organization where she works on campaigns to mobilize over 170,000 members around social issues.