Unruly Moments: Temporal Politics and Imaginaries in Artist Residencies, Retreats, and Gatherings

Abstract

My MA project explores decolonial temporalities that challenge the capitalist conception of time as a commodity. Through an investigation of artistic and curatorial practices—specifically artist residencies, retreats, and gatherings that emphasize sustained dialogue, curiosity, and play—my research contrasts these practices with capitalist notions of “use” and “productivity.” These creative forms resist material quantification, lack traditional measurable outcomes, and reject service to any utilitarian end in the global economy. Rather, by operating on the margins of late capitalist and colonial temporalities which prioritize progress and material value, they embody communal temporalities rooted in a refusal of “productive” time. My research consists of both a written component and a research-creation component grounded in community-based research. In the written portion, I analyze how capitalism and colonialism have enacted global, disciplinary temporal regimes based on standardization, linearity, and commodification. These regimes have shaped contemporary understandings of clock time, work time, care and leisure time. At the same time, I examine cracks within these systems—alternative temporalities that emphasize cyclical, autonomous, and multiplicitous notions of time. These temporal frameworks, I propose, offer a means to resist disciplinary measures of capitalist chrono politics that foreclose time and temporality. The research-creation component stems from Composed Escape, an artist residency I organized in the summer of 2023, which brought together five diasporic artists of color in Kingston, Ontario, in an informal gathering that embodied an intimate, non-productive being-in-time. Through reflections, anecdotes, and documentation collected during this residency as well as previous curatorial work, I present a praxis of decolonial temporal imaginings that centers autonomy, experimentation, and sensory ways of being. As I explore cultural practices of residencies, retreats, and gatherings through a temporal lens more broadly, my thesis proposes that by taking such projects seriously, one affirms the value of the intangible as a relational way of being outside of the constraints of mainstream temporality, and as a necessity for reclaiming agency over one’s own time. By distilling lessons from a wide selection of theoretical and research material, my interrogations contribute to a deeper understanding of how reimagining time can offer unruly possibilities for connection and restoration.