Sandbox is a little corner of the web that is dedicated to Iowa City artists working to engage the public in an interactive environment. Find out more here.
Hello, I’m Carolyn Bergonzo, the current writer-in-residence at Public Space One. I’ll be posting regularly here about the project I’m working on during my residency: a series of linked essays about alterations to time perception brought on by a variety of “temporal objects”: a novel, a move from one city to another (and then, another), an artwork, a relationship, a film piece, and a correspondence between friends.
I’ll be using my Sandbox space to describe my research and writing process, to trace the work that has shaped and inspired this project, and to share my own work. Any and all feedback is welcome, here or at bergonzo [at] gmail [dot] com.
I am a poet with an interest in the essay. Specifically, I need its generous form — an enclosure for the critical, personal, ruminative, lyric, ever on the verge of opening up to include more. As an amateur philosophy and art enthusiast, I want to write in conversation with these other fields and explore how the essay form permits that integration.
I want to be where theory opens up into lived event. My question is, How does time feel? Of course, this is a question philosophers have always been asking, (and I’ll write about some of them: William James, St. Augustine: “If the future and the past do exist, I want to know where they are”). But I’m most interested in writing about the experience of certain kinds of time: the time of longing, the time of a film, the time of a novel. Let’s say, someone you love leaves the city in which you live. How does that alter your experience of time? You find the day enormous, a constant exercise in calling yourself back from longing. Or…
My desire is to look attentively at these experiences of time while responding, with equal attentiveness, to cultural objects that open up questions of temporality:
- A certain novel that, during my reading of it, seemed to propel an element within it — a specific brand of tea preferred by the protagonist–into my life;
- A site-specific film piece by contemporary Scottish artist, Lucy Skaer, and its transformation, later, into a second, separate piece; and…
- My correspondence with a friend, an artist obsessed with time, whose love of the artist Félix González-Torres introduced me to his work, which elegantly materializes so many of these concepts of synchronicity and relationality, love and death and time.
In love & death & time,
CB
