“... ‘what happens when nothing else does’? Is there an atemporal eternity that is wholly separate to, or encompassing of, everyday duration? Are there times other than the present moment? Will it only ever move forward?”- Amelia Groom, Introduction//We’re five hundred years before the man we just robbed was born on book TIME, edited by Amelia Groom, Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press, 2013.



The indefiniteness of the term "TIME", together with the immense ways of referring to a state of time, is mirrored by the way we live it: this constant repetition of a present that has become past and will be future, almost a multiple and constant present, an inexistence of reaching the future and only through memories glimpsing the past.
We are stuck in a present. However much it does not let us out of this repetitive state of time, it is through it that we see the past and march, backwards, towards a future¹ .

The present is a frozen state of time, in which the living being (us) is only kept alive through the past, its reliving, sensations, actions, states of mind, ... where past timelines are created that mix and manipulate the present and, consequently, multiple (im)possible futures are created and/or kept alive by creating other possible presents and/or futures that often do not get to be lived beyond imagination.
Timelines only exist from the imagination and/or reflection on other periods of time by these beings frozen in a constant present, who would never come out alive from this multiple present² .
Unfrozen time is an unreachable time for us alive, trapped, frozen, blinded innocently believing in an attainable future, in a future as alive as we, frozen beings. The only possible moment or state to reach this TIME - past, present, future - is the thawing of this present from where we pass from living beings to
dead beings, as if each being existed in an ice cube and was "living" its day by day through a game (life) and, when we die in this game, that is the only moment when the cube is finally thawed and we start to experience this whole other timeline.

However, none of this is real and definitive any more than our definition of "TIME" which is constantly mutation, distortion, alteration, manipulation, transformation, variation, metamorphosis, change, mutability, modification.



1  “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” - Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Message, 1967

2  “Once upon a time, the past was the past and the present was today.” - Elena Filipovic, This is Tomorrow (and Other Modernist Myths), 2007