Timekeepers, in its month-long workshop+lab format, culminated in July with two days of sharing of processes, materials, food, readings and performative gestures. Conceptualized by Sonam Chaturvedi in conversation with Shared Ecologies and the Timekeepers ~ Pallavi ☉ Kuldeep ◎ asma ⎓ Manika ☁︎ Meghna﹌Akshay ◌ Somyaa ✵ Smiha ‣ Karan ✦ Ishita ⚆ Surbhi ❀ Saahil ~ MycoDyke ☽ Mahek ▷ Soumya+

The month-long engagement allowed for slow, everyday continuities form our experiences of Time, rupturing the linearity of past-present-future. It was rooted between bodies~material~processes as entangled grounds where Time sprouts~leaks~teases~ always remaining ungraspable from our reach. The first day brought together all the material-objects each of us stayed with over the month, alongside their processes as visual/sonic documentation, mark-making, text, performances.

The tables oozed with sensorial experiences, materials passing from one body to another, hands moving in circles~spirals~oscillations~smell-to-taste-to-sound-, food entering-merging bodies. Time ~ synesthetic. It was a fruit day— we sat peeling~cutting~chewing~ while listening to each person slowly share their process.

The temporality of a material flows against the duration of a month-long workshop, hence our gathering marked only a moment in its life, our life, to observe/listen/sense it together. The objects were not individuated, but emerged through our collective ‘intra-actions’.

The next day was guided by the materials, improvising into precarious paths— threads spread like networks, connecting bodies, objects, spaces. Food that involved slowness was brought into the potluck of textual references~poems~khus smell~paper pulp~soap bubbles~scrolling-oscillating time~stories of interspecies co-existence~of counting~fermenting~baking time~~ all colliding into sticky viscous relations, in languages beyond our horizons of articulation.

‘Timekeepers’ spills over the workshop’s time[frame], into relations carried forward, materials we keep revisiting, attending together as we keep gathering, sharing, playing across Time, teasing the barricades of clocks-calendars into the wilderness of lived experiences.