FRAGILITY OF TIME

TILA

The photographic record of an Italian couple’s successful life together is thrown away. An Angolan photographer, informal archivist, and historiographer living in Milan comes across it in a doorway, in a box of discarded records. He retrieves it, rewrites the narrative, giving their memory new life – the time you now see. Time. A curious concept with many interpretations related to different aims in life. Some attach no concept of unilinear historical progress to time, marking it by their experience of memorable events. Others measure it by the clock and the calendar as an irreversible timeline spanning the past through the present to the future. Most of us have felt time in flux: at one time, for the time being, time after time, in good time.

Délio Jasse’s sense of time follows another idea of narrating time: emotional preciseness. What emotional preciseness connects the artist’s time to the time depicted in the discarded 1990s holiday photos of an anonymous Italian couple in sensual abandon in Morocco, Tunisia, and Cuba?

Fragility of Time comes from the initial narrative of how these photographs (and other documental evidence) were found by the artist, when the record of a fortunate life was deemed to be no longer of value. Moved at the invalidation of these records from a chronological time not so far from our own, he salvaged them, incorporating their time narrative into his own: the events that have marked his life –migration, uprooting, loss, dispersion of family ties, travel. These are places that enable the artist to connect with the anonymous subjects of his work, regardless of their origin. This fusion of time narratives roots him in the emotional landscapes of his journey, giving his work a haunting and poignant quality that transcends the time portrayed in the photographs, transforming them into non-linear historical records that link time to spaces, circumstances, and emotions.

Délio Jasse’s treatment of photography dwells outside the instant digital image. His use of analogue processes to re(ad)dress his subjects emulates the period in which the records were made. That, allied to the artist’s ability to sense time with emotional preciseness and the fact that he does not view photography as immortalized time or subscribe to the production of the self-image as a projection of oneself into a universally aspiring future, denotes Délio Jasse’s concern with the current debates on the proliferation of images, “which, according to Fredric Jameson, amounts to both a ‘dehumanizing’ or ‘derealizing’ process and a ‘cannibalizing’ of culture.”

What is the artist’s purpose in reworking these records? Building other forms of archive, of memorializing (hi)stories, participating in the growing call for the production of new historiographies. There’s an urgency to that call and it is not that time is running out. It is a call to a time imbued with other meanings, where our perception of events does not submit to a chronological order but is broadened to multiple time narratives. In the words of Saint Augustine, “a time present of things past; a time present of things present; and a time present of things future.” ^ _

Tila Likunzi (b. 1982) is an independent art curator from Angola, living and working between Luanda and Bonn, active since 2017. In 2018, she participated in the C& Critical Writing Workshop and Mentoring Program in Luanda, which launched her career as a curator. Her practice is process- and researchbased, focused on shareabilities between contemporary art, critical theory, and decoloniality. Besides writing, she pursues sound, orality, video, photography, and film as artistic and curatorial languages.