The Institute of Suspended Time

The Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido (Institute of Suspended Time, ITS) is a project by Javier Bassas (Barcelona, 1978) and Raquel Friera (Barcelona, 1974) which came into being as a fictitious (non)institution seeking to revise temporal regimes established in society.

Through the facilities of one of its sites and a series of periodic activations by the artists, ITS questions ubiquitous “chrono-normativity” and suggests alternatives to reappropriate time expropriated by capitalism, acceleration and hyperproductivity.

ITS encourages visitors to delve into their relationship with time through a journey around different areas of its office (as a consultancy, department of temporal justice or the department to de-accelerate neurones), as well as reading the Institute’s Statutes, “chrono crimes” and a broad bibliographic selection assembled for the occasion.

Participants

Javier Bassas is a philosopher, translator and editor. He holds a PhD in French Philology and Philosophy from the Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, and from the University of Barcelona, where he currently lectures in the Department of French Studies. His work focuses on the relationship between language, politics and aesthetics, and the translation of contemporary French thought.

Raquel Friera is an artist. With a degree in Economics and Fine Art, her projects combine a critical gaze of economy, gender awareness, historical re-readings and themes such as work and the production of subjectivities. In recent years, she has exhibited her work at different institutions such as CentroCentro (Madrid), MUSAC (León), Casal Solleric (Palma), Fundació Tàpies (Barcelona), Virreina (Barcelona) and MUAC (Mexico).