A Walk 4/7
by Salvatore Lacagnina
The history of the clock is inseparable from the history of the city and of social life beyond the countryside. The cycle of the sun was not enough. Nor was an approximate measure of time.To the mathematician and writer Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll) we owe one of the most famous novels of modern literature, where the measurement and perception of time are among the protagonists of the story. It is a story everyone knows, perhaps in Disney’s reassuring version.
The Mad Hatter’s watch shows the days of the month, not the hours. Who decided that a watch must necessarily mark the hours?
In Wonderland it is always six o’clock, tea time: the table is large, but there is no time to wash the cups; you have to move to a new place to find a clean one. What might seem like imprisonment is in fact the ability to grasp Time in its true essence: it is static, always identical to itself, but under the push of imagination and desire it can bend to individual need. In Wonderland, time exists only in the form each individual chooses to give it: one can wish for lunch time to arrive soon or for it always to be tea time. The only character who seems to escape this total freedom is the White Rabbit.
With his pocket watch he is perpetually late: he lives a frenetic life, always forced to run and suffering from the absence of rules that “govern” Wonderland. In his case, Time is always ahead of him.
“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting IT. It’s HIM.”
“I don't know what you mean,” said Alice.
“Of course you don’t!” the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. “I dare say you never even spoke to Time!”
“Perhaps not,” Alice cautiously replied: “but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.”
“Ah! that accounts for it,” said the Hatter. “He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.”
The Hatter’s paradox evokes Miles Davis’ famous retort to a misguided interviewer who once raised the supposed genetic superiority of Black musicians over white. “Not genetically,” said the trumpeter in his gravelly voice. “But they play differently. White musicians seem to lag up behind the beat.” The blues, he implied, lies in the thrill of anticipation.
The flow of time is inherent in the experience of LAVINIA, which takes place in a park, outdoors: the daily cycle of the sun and of the seasons, the August sun, the spontaneous herbs that grow unchecked in spring, the rains. Every experience of LAVINIA is inseparable from these “times.” Autumn in the western Mediterranean is the time of the grape harvest, and the gardens on the northern and southern shores of this “middle sea” take on the orange of oranges and the yellow of lemons. In Eugenio Montale’s allegorical language we could say:
There’s no unique time, rather many tapes
running parallel,
often contradictory, and rarely
intersecting.
Ruth Ewan
We Could’ve Been Anything That We Wanted to Be
The measurement of time in multiples of 12and 60 goes back to the great mathematicians of antiquity: the Babylonians. While the names of the months and days evolved and changed in different cultures and religions, for some reason the Babylonians’ complex division was never altered. A clock that measures the day on the basis of 10 now greets visitors to LAVINIA. We Could’ve Been Anything That We Wanted to Be is “a contemporary echo of a bold historic attempt to redefine and rationalise the day. On 5 October 1793 the recently formed French Republic abandoned the widely used Gregorian calendar in favour of an entirely new model: the French Republican Calendar, which became the official calendar of France for the following thirteen years, carrying the ideals of the new republic directly into the lives of every citizen. As the Ancien Régime was torn up and reordered, time itself was dismantled. Just a couple of miles across the Channel, France temporarily drummed to a different modern rhythm—that of the decimal second.” This is how Ruth Ewan described her work in the text accompanying its first installation in 2011 in Folkestone, a coastal town on the Channel, concluding: “A metaphor for changing, restructuring and challenging systems— systems which are part of all our lives and so engrained in our day-to-day culture that we sometimes fail to acknowledge them. Over time, systems evolve and so they continue to be questioned, challenged, reformed and remoulded by generations to come.”
LAVINIA now has a new unit of measurement, in the hope that it may also be a unit of dismeasure.
Ruth Ewan is a Glasgow-based artist whose pluralistic practice spans installations, writing, events, environments, and objects. Though varied in form, her works emerge from deep research and collaboration, often shaped through conversations with others. She is particularly concerned with creativity as a tool for social and environmental justice, alternative systems of knowledge, and how our relationships with plants, animals, and time shape cultural narratives. For over two decades, she has returned to these themes, creating projects that invite audiences to rethink history, standard time, and collective memory.
She has exhibited widely at venues including Tate Britain, Camden Arts Centre, New Museum, CAPC Bordeaux, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, and the São Paulo Biennial, and has developed public projects with Artangel, the High Line, and Folkestone Triennial. Current commissions include Everything Must Change (a permanent alternative time system in Gothenburg) and The Green Fuse (an urban forest and arboreal calendar for Stuttgart).
Her books include Twenty-Nine Thousand Nights and Liberties of the Savoy (Book Works). She has also lectured widely, created workshops across education and community settings, and her work is held in major collections including Tate, the Scottish Parliament, and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar
Sarcophagus
At the centre of the Loggia sits an open sarcophagus. It is decorated with a frieze presenting repeated casts, made over time, of parts of the artist’s body: hands, legs, feet, arms, heads. Almost mimicking friezes and sarcophagi of past civilisations, this fragmented self-portrait is not only made in life — unlike ancient death masks — but crystallises passing time, the changing body. Lili Reynaud-Dewar uses her own body as a unit of measure; she plays with time, with art history, with the context of the Loggia dei Vini and with the infinite friezes encountered along the streets and in the museums of Rome (including, of course, the Borghese collection). For the opening, as in the festivities for which the Loggia was designed, the sarcophagus becomes a container of ice and wine bottles, to celebrate dancing bodies.
When your feet danced so hard in anger,
Paris! when you received so many knifewounds,
When you were stretched out, retaining
in your clear eyes,
A little of the goodness of the tawny spring,
Arthur Rimbaud, Parisian Orgy or Paris Repopulated, May 1871
Trans. Wallace Fowlie. Chicago University Press, 1966.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar is a French artist whose practice draws on her own life, the lives of her friends, her body, and literature. Working across film, installation, sculpture, and print, she develops a heterogeneous body of work that merges the personal with the political. After studying ballet and public law in the 1990s, she completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2001–2003).
In 2009, she co-founded Petunia, a feminist art and entertainment magazine. Since 2012, she has been professor at the Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva, where she has collaborated with students to form collectives and produce films, exhibitions, and seminars.
Reynaud-Dewar received the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2021 for her film installation Rome, November 1st and 2nd 1975, in which more than twenty of her close friends, collaborators, and students re-enact the final hours of poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Between 2020 and 2023, she produced a 19-hour film adaptation of Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio. She is currently working on her autobiography.
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska