Tempus Project

TEMPUS is a project directed by Bruna Mibielli  (BR) and Inesa Markava (BY) dealing with the concept of time through the experience of nature. It is a series of perfomances in which Bruna Mibielli constructs scenes to Inesa Markava to explore with her body, involving dance and perfomance techniques.

Other artists are involved in the creation process. João Taurino (PT) explores music in this project. He plays with sounds of human body and sounds of the water, which is a symbol of life itself. He adds echoes and floats with variations of rhythm along the sound of a heart beat to the tracks. The sounds proposes an emulation of living fluxes by suggesting a life time with a non-chronological path and creates time in cycles through the sounds of the water.

Clarissa Serafim (BR) develops costumes for the performances and contributes sewing dialogues between fashion and art.

The core aims of the performatic part of this project emerges on the concept choreo-graphy, from the original Greek: khoros (chorus). Khoreia (dancing in unison) happens when nature, architecture, ambience, music elaborations and graphic elements appearing on the surface of the paper come together.

The context in which this project started is the disasters occurred in Portugal during the dry season, (2017) when large forest areas were completely burned, including houses and entire villages. The dantesque landscape which rests after a fire is the scenario where the three artists working in this performance took inspiration. This context stimulates artistic choices reflecting on what can be time under the aegis of nature.

Time is usually measured by light and is intrinsic related to the earth movements: rotation and revolution. This means that usually society take as reference a movement expressed by an outsider corpus. The sun was chosen as the referential, as it is a body located outside everything, even from earth. It is outside but it is present all the time changing life on earth. What one should consider is that time cannot be measured because it cannot be divided. Of course society has to stablish parameters to organize life, but we all acknowledge that time exceeds the measurements of a clock.

Latin languages use the same word, for example in Portuguese: TEMPO to comprehend chronological time and atmospherical time. This doesn’t occur in English for example. TIME is used for chronological and WHEATHER is used for atmospherical. In German, the same occurs, ZEIT and WETTER. For this reason, one can infer that TEMPO is present in other elements and not only in light. In this performance we evoke this using dry and wet nature elements, like the music is wet, with water sounds and the blood imagined with the heartbeats, and we use also wood ashes, charcoal pigment related to the dry part of nature.

The performance invites the viewer to investigate how we live time in contemporaneity. We should remember that we are not the masters of our own time, in the sense that time one lives suffer a lot from outside influences. Nevertheless, everybody can be aware of the inner (one’s acts and thoughts related to relationships, work, responsibilities, etc.) and outer (nature, ambient, surroundings, pollution, technology, etc.) elements that contributes to big changes on time experience. This way we are more empowered to shape life as we like to live it.