Time Smuggler
Time Smuggler is an invitation to drift through layers of time and space, experiencing the city with a new sense of weight, joy, and purpose, using only the body as a building material
This performance will unfold in urban spacetime with two sequences, starting promptly at 16:00 and 16:30.
The doors tightened as we went through, tracing the canals in which time flows, seeking to unleash the logic of dream, to exist equally on both sides of the awakening. TIME SMUGGLER is an invitation to drift between a few layers of time and space, to experience an urban space with a different sensation of weight, joy, and purpose while working with the body alone as a building material. We explore multiple possibilities for processing reality, approaching it through a new framework that regards the space between bodies (both human and nonhuman) as a site for transformation. Following paths and ladders that emerge and disappear between waking and dreaming, we greet you here, between thing and transition.
TIME SMUGGLER was initiated as a prompt from Isabel Lewis to her students of performance at the Fine Art Academy in Leipzig. The students were challenged to construct a work in the urban landscape using only the materiality of the body itself and material generated by the human body, i.e. gesture, voice, energy, etc. as the only construction material. A former engine shed for the nearby train station and now a large ruin in the center of the city of Leipzig was the initial chosen site of activation. On this site, very quickly the creation process turned to ideas around failing infrastructures and high speed development and gentrification in the city center of Leipzig, a European city like many others that faces sharp increases in living costs and suffers the effects of inflation.
TIME SMUGGLER, with its bodily sensitivity to space and the material reality of this ruin, took on a feeling of resistance to the daunting speed and linear progression of time in the race for economic and technological development. There seemed to be a need to attempt to uncover/recover a sense of agency and possibility in the urban landscape. Looking toward dream logics and smuggling them into waking life and vice versa seemed a way to find spatiotemporally deceptive apparatuses that could render other ways of relating to ecology, society, and the urban experience. TIME SMUGGLER thus became this collection of spatiotemporal strategies, scores, and modes of response that travels with the students to various sites and is adapted in response to the material, social, and contextual conditions of each place.

Time Smuggler, performance at GfZK Leipzig, Klasse für Performative Künste and Friends, 2023. Photo: Alexandra Ivanciu
Time Smuggler
Time Smuggler is an invitation to drift through layers of time and space, experiencing the city with a new sense of weight, joy, and purpose, using only the body as a building material
10.10.2024
16.00 — 17.00
- Event: Performance
- Venue: Palazzo Bembo
- Presence: In-person