The Ecosystemic Clock

A paper presented as part of "More-than-human Spatio-temporalities and Encounters", one of two three-person panels proposed by Goldsmiths' Centre for Art and Ecology in response to the conference's call for papers.

‘The Ecosystemic Clock’ is a reflection on institutional habitability, or to be more specific, on the structures and infrastructures, both enabling and disabling, under and within which cultural workers operate, practice, hosts others, and make a living. This paper engages with the subject of time (metamorphic time, institutional time, temporal diversity) and looks for inspiration in the fields of ecology, agroecology, and arboriculture, to reconceptualize art institutions’ relationship to waiting, slowness, rest, and longevity. What would happen – and what does, indeed, happen – if curatorial and institutional practice substituted linear clock time for cyclical ecological time?