Lucrecia Wang
A Cabinet of Honesty

In It Is About Time, Lucrecia Wang and her alter ego Lucy Winter-Jones present an immersive installation and a performative reading inside the Cirque Auditorium. In connection with the site’s history as a 19th-century anatomical theatre, the installation takes the shape of a cabinet of curiosities or a research bureau. The auditorium, equipped with dark wooden furniture, showcases microscopic tools for exploration and meticulously crafted clocks and watches that tell anything but time. These objects are used to manipulate and shield us from the time-eating parasite Tempus Devorantis, which induces an illness identifiable with a doomed sense of time and extreme empathy fatigue. This illness, under the name Chronomania, marks the world that Lucrecia and Lucy create in their reading, building a narrative in what seems to be a post-Victorian and post-industrial era. Rooted in her former nursing career, the project It Is About Time started with a personal frustration about the lack of care and time within health systems and her loss of the ability to care for others.

Dear Lucrecia,

At the dawn of both of our graduations and in light of your work, I felt it fitting to use this time to address you in a letter and express my gratitude for your honest project. Honesty is a virtue that is sadly too often lacking in our times of hyper-independence. The irony, of course, is that we need others. At some point in our lives, most of us will need others to take care of us.

In your earlier career as a nurse, you took care of many. During difficult shifts, you were responsible for more than a dozen people, and at night, the whole floor. It is very apprehensible that you lost your will to care for others, and as you later realised, that time itself was failing you.

I, for sure, can relate to you.

At the time of meeting you, I was rounding up the projects I had undertaken during my year in Curatorial Studies. I was proud but I was exhausted. Current debates on curating state that the profession should take on the responsibility of fostering a kind and caring world in which art and artists can healthily exist. For a large part, this is also why I chose curating as a field. But there are so many emotional and laborious pitfalls to the act of caring.

Did I go over the limits of my ability to care for others and myself? How has this affected the nature and quality of my interactions and connections? These are questions that I am sure many ask themselves, too.

In Delusions of Care, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung puts into question the positively assumed nature of care, especially, when it too often implies an imbalance between the caregiver and the caretaker. I quote, “What is care in a system built on and framed around limitless profit, solely for profit’s sake?”¹ Just as time itself is a construct, so is the value that is placed on it. Time is commodified and as a result, some people’s time is valued more than that of others. Can genuine care for ourselves, others, and the world around us truly occur in an incessant pursuit of productivity and constant competition?

The narrative you create and the assemblages you gather, severely affected by Chronomania, allow a peek at a world based on ours. The setting of the Cirque and the theatrical experience you allow cause a sense of displacement within the audience. What you address, however, is very much real.

It is no accident that the clock takes a central place in your installation as its relentless ticking reminds us of our fight against time. Your project emphasises the need for change within the exploitative systems of care. Too often enhancing class and gender inequalities, these systems exert an invisible act of body regulation.

I vividly recall you telling me that you started the project by searching for a justification as to why care left your body. You sought the origin of your failure and a solution to regain this inherent compassion. At this moment, I realised that this is an imposed gendered tendency.

You form a link between the origin of the parasite Tempus Devorantis and the start of time when Eve plucked the forbidden fruit and fated humankind as mortal. You presented me with the parasite, both flimsy in material and small in size, yet having a chokehold on our lives. If time is infinite but the nature of humans intrinsically contains an end, aren’t we set up to fail from the start?

During the creation of your minuscule and detailed work, you endured countless hours of repetitive gestures. I asked you, what is the difference between this time-enduring act as opposed to the one you experienced working as a nurse. Your answer was: “choice”.

The American author bell hooks writes that to love is an act of will, and that will also implies choice.² Care is a vital aspect of love and, so, I would argue that we need to stand still and realise our active participation in the churning of the system.

Your title, It Is About Time, is not only a proclamation of what the project is about, but it is also an authentic assertion for action. Your honesty takes shape in the intricate testaments of your research and the stories you tell – all of which ask the viewer their time to discover and appreciate. You don’t shy away from admitting the relatable frustration and assumed weakness that is too often invisible in experienced fatigue and failure, but through your narrative with a sly wink, you allow for hope and inspiration.

I thank you for that.

With an honest heart,

Camille

¹ Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Delusions of Care (Archive Books, 2021), 8.
² bell hooks, all about love: new visions (Harper, 1999), 4–5.