Abstract
Sahej Rahal’s 2022 exhibition ANCESTORS presented findings from an alleged archaeological site to narrate an alien temporality inside the confines of the history museum. We reflect on how the exhibition demonstrates that encounters with appropriately narrated objects constitute a sort of “temporal heist,” forcing its observers to reconsider their present through a new temporality. By articulating the concept of a temporal heist we suggest that the Anthropocene thesis performs an analogous function. Like Rahal’s ANCESTORS, the Anthropocene narrates the mundane objects we interact with in a way that connects them, and their users and observers to a different temporality.
Sahej Rahal的2022年展览“先祖”, 展示了一个传闻中的考古遗址发现, 讲述了历史博物馆内陌生人的时间性。我们思考了该展览如何证明这样一个观点: 与被恰当描述的物体的相遇, 构成了“时间窃取”, 这迫使观察者采用新的时间性来重新考虑观察者的现在。通过阐明“时间窃取”概念, 我们认为, 人类世也具有类似功能。与Rahal的“先祖”一样, 人类世叙述了与我们互动的寻常物体, 这种互动将物体、物体使用者、观察者与不同的时间性相互联系起来。
La exposición ANCESTROS de Sahej Rahal en 2022 exhibió los hallazgos de un supuesto yacimiento arqueológico para narrar una temporalidad de fuera de este mundo, dentro de los confines del museo de historia. Reflexionamos sobre el modo como demuestra la exposición que los encuentros con los objetos adecuadamente narrados constituyan una suerte de “atraco temporal” que obliga a sus observadores a reconsiderar su presente a través de una nueva temporalidad. Articulando el concepto de un atraco temporal, sugerimos que la tesis del Antropoceno desempeña una función análoga. Como en el caso de los ANCESTROS de Rahal, el Antropoceno narra los objetos mundanos con los cuales interactuamos en una forma que los conecta, lo mismo que a sus usuarios y observadores, con una temporalidad diferente.
INTRODUCTION
Sahej Rahal’s 2022 exhibition ANCESTORS presented findings from an alleged archaeological site to narrate an alien time inside the confines of a history museum. We use ANCESTORS to propose that appropriately narrated objects can enact a temporal heist, forcing those who encounter these objects to reconsider the present through a new temporal lens. Rahal’s solo-installation at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS Citation2023) Museum in Mumbai consisted of a collection of artifacts and a story about their supposed discovery at an archaeological excavation on the banks of a tributary to the Bhima River in Maharashtra. Anecdotally, the exhibition had some visitors believe that it was part of the museum’s permanent collections; that the artifacts were genuine archeological findings. The artifacts, coupled with the story of their discovery successfully manifested an alternative history, and in this paper we will look at ANCESTORS for what it was: a plot to steal the present and embed it in a different temporality.
Meanwhile, the notion that we are in the Anthropocene has introduced new temporal frames for consideration in the humanities. If the Anthropocene is a geological epoch named after human causal influence across Earth systems, it presupposes that we, and life in general, have always been a factor (Ginn et al. Citation2018). It is through this inference that the geologic time scale’s frame of reference is forced onto our self-apprehension with renewed force. But in what ways can we relate to our situation as geologic beings? What does it mean, practically, to view our surroundings through a hierarchical time scale, so as to “make it our world” (Sellars Citation2007, 408)?
The aim of this paper is to extract a model of a “temporal heist” from ANCESTORS and use that as a tool for making sense of what the Anthropocene thesis demands of “us.” Both cases, despite their disparate scales, connect the present to a different time, and we are interested in detailing the rules of the game.
The perceived need to attend to geologic temporalities poses interdisciplinary challenges. Both social theory that is ignorant of the constitutive role geology has in society and Earth Systems sciences that diagram the social as a single causal block are increasingly seen as insufficient (Clark and Gunaratnam Citation2017). In creating a better connection between different knowledge traditions, there is an important role for the geohumanities to show how non-human temporal perspectives and ecological literacies can be depicted, applied, and ultimately inhabited. Amanda Boetzkes has phrased the challenge by asking what kind of “eye” (Boetzkes Citation2015, 278) the Anthropocene might result in, keeping the issue grounded in experience. The Anthropocene is not just a way of seeing; it is a way of temporalizing what is seen. It is an inscription of the present in geologic time.
Others have proposed that the literary genre of theory-fiction can be a way to become acquainted with other times and worldviews (Szerszynski Citation2017a), and it is in this context we wish to discuss the role of sensible objects as anchors capable of extending theory-fiction to the ocular register. When successful, such objects can perform what we call a heist, displacing one inhabited temporality for another.
THEORY-FICTION AND THE OBJECT
It is perhaps misguiding to call theory-fiction a genre, but it is a helpful term to group a diverse group of literary texts that self-consciously relate to philosophy and fiction in one way or another. As Szerszynski writes, the relationship can take on many forms (Citation2017a) including everything from fictive philosophy and apocrypha to Bildungsromanen where the story carries a philosophical or cultural theoretical argument. Theory-fiction is a term that could be used about a considerable group of texts where philosophical experimentation and fiction are mutually related. But the term became widely used with reference to Baudrillard (Fisher Citation1999) and later through Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (Citation2008) a book in which the Middle East becomes a living entity, animated by oil and blood. But a widened history of theory-fiction might include both revisionist myths like Donna Haraway’s cyborg (Citation1987) and the alternative worlds of Borges. Among other examples, François Laruelle and Anne-Françoise Schmid together head L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale where fiction is treated as a direct tool for breaking with or undermining foundational suppositions of the history of philosophy.
In the Anthropocene context, climate and science fictions of different denominations are already considered productive means for creating politically salient imaginaries (Ginn et al. Citation2018; Harris Citation2020; Tsing et al. Citation2017; Zalasiewicz Citation2009). According to one line of thinking, ideas about how the world might become are said to be necessary for understanding what is at stake and serve as important lead-ups to action. For similar, but distinct reasons, we will suggest that theory-fictional texts experimenting with and staging temporal and spatial frames have an important role to play. Haraway’s recent “SF” (traditionally short for sci-fi) traverses the full array of “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism”, and “science fact” (Citation2016, 2) to articulate a distinctive speculative style for addressing the Anthropocene problematic in the broad purview of theory-fiction is a good example.
Following it, we propose that theory-fiction can help meet demands for including different knowledge traditions in the Anthropocene (see Lövbrand et al. Citation2015, 217), and incorporating colonial histories and present environmental crises in the Anthropocene concept (Davis and Todd Citation2017). If the ambiguities of the Anthropocene (Dalby Citation2016; Malhi Citation2017) can be opened to accommodate human history, theory-fiction can be a tool (see Lorimer Citation2017; Szerszynski Citation2017b), with which, for example, Haraway, Negarestani, and Szerszynki can be seen as opening mythological and speculative angles that contrast with state-sanctioned histories.
Geographers have been interested in different notions of time, from the repetitions of everyday life kept in place by clock-time (Glennie and Thrift Citation2009) to the ontologies and lived experiences of events (Ash, Gordon, and Mills Citation2022). But how do temporal constructs, regardless of origin, gain traction on the everyday? The question is methodological rather than ontological when we consider notions like the Anthropocene. How are temporalities woven into and enacted in the present? Similar topics have been approached by geographers interested in the affective force of representations (Anderson Citation2019), and more broadly by a post-phenomenological focus on how intentional relationships come into being and transform (Ash and Simpson Citation2016). But for us, the matter-of-factual object adds an interesting dimension as the interface through which to plot temporal heists.
Sheila Hones discusses texts as multi-faceted “spatial events” (Hones Citation2008; see also Saunders Citation2013), such that reading and writing can be understood in terms of a context-specific unfolding which nevertheless ties together interpretations and analyses that would otherwise be difficult to relate. The role played by space and place in encounters with texts is thereby brought into focus. A given space, such as an exhibition, can be understood through the textual encounters which transpire there.
Consider the matter-of-factual mode of presentation that sometimes exists in history museums. Matter-of-factual does not denote objectivity in the sense of a view from nowhere, rather, we wish to indicate the sort of exhibitions hosted by museums of cultural or natural history, where display cases, curatorial statements and similar devices narrate the objects as evidence of something which exists or has existed in another milieu (see Brenna Citation2014). The operation may be part of how museums stage and reproduce national, religious, and cultural identities, a process which has long been recognized (Mclean Citation1998). The exhibited objects bear witness to a time beyond their immediacy and are capable of legitimating historical narratives.
Exhibitions about the Anthropocene have been discussed in similar terms. In an investigation of the witnessing exhibition Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands, Bergsveinn Thórsson (Citation2020) focuses on the oppositions and multiple meanings inherent in the notion. The museum becomes a place where the visitor is physically present and engages with “material and semiotic agencies” (Citation2020, 107) of various kinds, to the point of seeming to be one themselves. The perspective emerging from this line of thought is comparable to Hones’s notion of the text as an event unfolding in space. The exhibition that is immersed in a matter-of-factual aesthetic can be seen as bringing into play notional constructs and even entire worlds—which in this case is the Anthropocene and the wider geologic time scale. Geologic time is first of all a bundle of ideas, debates, and texts, which are represented and set in motion in the museum. Although these are in some sense aesthetic concerns, we are not necessarily highlighting any classically aesthetic qualities of an object, be it beauty, abjection, or sublimity. As Thórsson notes, it can just as well be oppositions and contrasts within an overarching temporality that are carried by the exhibited object that matter. Yes, we are really “here” in a present of colonial horror and climate breakdown whether we term it the Anthropocene or anything else. What the uneasy framing reveals is the possibility to construe a new temporality for such everyday objects as shoes and monkey vices. The Anthropocene and its cognate terms re-temporalize the present, and in the best scenario the museum or exhibition space can become a site through which the everyday can be understood specifically as an Anthropocene everyday.
But what happens with the matter-of-factual aesthetic of witnessing when it is charged with theory-fictive elements?
Honing in on this question, we will transition to a more explicit discussion of objects and what we might call a “modest” object-oriented approach. Geography, like other disciplines, has seen an upsurge in talk about objects (Meehan, Shaw, and Marston Citation2013; Shaw and Meehan Citation2013) and interest in notions like Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects” (Citation2013) that describe phenomenally reticent entities such as the atmosphere or the sum total of human geomorphic impact. Here, we would like to drop some of the philosophical commitments involved in other modes of object-orientation and return to phenomenal objects without any explicit ontological ambition (in contrast to, for example, Harman Citation2018). Such a philosophically “modest” approach to objects helps us see them as tools to anchor the Anthropocene and other temporal narratives with the help of theory-fiction. To anticipate our idea, the encountered object standing under a matter-of-factual presentation can be seen as a nexus relating temporal constructs back to the site of the encounter, carrying the perceiving subject with it on the ride. To grasp such an object is to be grasped by its context in turn.
So in talking about object-orienting theory-fiction, we are talking about encounters with theoretically charged but matter-of-factually presented objects. Rahal’s ANCESTORS illustrates how such assemblages can enact temporal heists.
ANCESTORS
When it comes to conducting a temporal heist, it does not matter whether or not the story being told is true. ANCESTORS was shown in the spring of 2022 at CSMVS Museum in Mumbai, India. The exhibition was curated by Puja Vaish (D’Lima Citation2022). The installation consisted of two essential components: one, a collection of objects—digital and physical; and two, a fragmented narrative embedding the objects in a suggestive but incomplete context. Together, the components forced visitors to view into the depths of time by generating an aura luring the visitor to think about what was given to them.
Many of the objects were allegedly artifacts recovered from an archeological site near the Bhima River in Maharashtra. Among the various objects, exhibited on walls, shelves, display cases, and freely in the room, there were half-meter-sized funeral urns, various tools, and petrified creatures reminiscent of six-legged mammals and what appears to be at least one human body well-preserved in gold. The artifacts were presented together with several numbered illustrations of an archaeologist’s impression of the artifacts, and a short theoretical background story detailing their alleged discovery. The collection was exhibited in a dimly lit blue-painted chamber, reminiscent of a catacomb—and it may very well be the case that the museum space itself played the role of a catacomb, preserving its contents for the future (see ).
FIGURE 1 ANCESTORS by Sahej Rahal, 2022. Curated by Puja Vaish. Courtesy Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation. Photography by Anil Rane.
CSMVS Museum is a non-profit institution that hosts art and cultural history collections that can be assumed to play a role in producing national, religious, and cultural identities (CSMVS Citation2023). Here, ANCESTORS constituted something like an integrated counterpoint against narratives of national foundation, smuggling a peculiar alternative temporality into the heart of nation-building that worked to erode trust in prevalent, sanitized understandings of Indian history. Anecdotally, some visitors believed that ANCESTORS was a part of the permanent collections: authentic objects part of an authentic history.
The temporal heist transpired through the undeniable presence of the objects in the exhibition side by side with the “serious” narratives on display elsewhere in the museum. In contrast, the artifacts of ANCESTORS resisted full assimilation to any known culture, and yet they project a fictive time that visitors needed to respond to and cognize as they considered the double origin of the excavated objects.
TEMPORAL HEISTS
ANCESTORS demonstrates how time can be synthesized contrary to the extant temporalities of the museum. The visitor becomes a detective, someone who must train their eye on the past to understand what they see before them. In ANCESTORS, the artifacts anchored the narrative before its visitors’ eyes, but the strange tools, urns, and other artifacts also required visitors to add to the narrative to fill the void. “What sort of world have they descended from”? For an artist deliberately plotting a temporal heist, the challenge lies in presenting the object matter-of-factually, together with an associative and projective narrative that stays short of fully specifying a situation or story in the sense of a full-fledged science fiction story, leaving room for extrapolation.
In the case of ANCESTORS, the object’s presentation was mirrored by the openness and underdetermination of its narration in that the objects also stood beyond their construed context, where a long-lost Neolithic culture is one possible interpretation. Although it may always be impossible to present an object without determinate conceptual tangibility—“I see no apple, but even so, there’s a red patch”—objects are never exhausted by any given narrative or theoretical device. There is always something else to tell, and it is this narrative lapse at the heart of objectivity that ANCESTORS utilized to enact a temporal heist within the confines of the museum space. We call it a “heist” to emphasize the surreptitious manner in which the setup captured visitors and to open it up for methodological reflection and critique.
It works like this: A subject perceives a phenomenal object which is projected into a narrated temporality = x. Such a temporality can be an entirely fictive construct or make an epistemic claim on reality, such as the geologic time scale, bearing no direct resemblance to the phenomenology of perceiving its object which anchors it to the subject. And because the object is present in front of the observer, understanding the temporal projection means understanding oneself in relation to it as well. The object captures its observer like a hook catches a fish.
It is in the encounter with narrated objects that we discover how specious our temporal constructs are even as the encountered objects enable us to think about other times. It is through actual trilobite fossils that the group Trilobita can be identified and delineated. There is an entire literary genre dedicated to more and less well-founded speculations about how the pyramids at Giza were constructed. Clearly, Egyptian society during the fourth dynasty exercised a significant geologic agency, but the exact details can be modeled but not confirmed based on sheer pyramidal facts. We only know that, but in knowing this, it is possible for all kinds of bandits to invent what might have been.
Geographers who are interested in deep time and the Anthropocene might find it worthwhile to investigate the dynamics of creating temporal narratives as an artistic practice in its own right. The tools and methods used to weave, legitimize and render sensible temporal narratives, and also dynamics and kinematics of power inscribed in the social relations emerging from the construction of temporalities can be highlighted through the heist framing, which the following points serve to clarify:
Involuntary: “Heist” suggests that one experiences it as a “victim.” Visitors who believed ANCESTORS were in effect tricked to represent themselves in a different temporality. We do not insinuate that ANCESTORS was exceptionally violent compared to other exhibitions, but heists are transgressive in a way that invites ethical reflection.
Irreducible: A temporal heist is the conceptual representation of the present in an unusual temporal framework (for example, geological time). It does not operate on history but on the time that contains history, transfiguring how the present is understood.
Autonomous: A heist does not need to result from the deliberate acts of an author; it can occur without a plot. Plotting is a possibility but the author may not be fully in control.
It is worth considering whether and how such temporalities are object-oriented in principle, and how, in this context, different objects are being placed in the service of narration. An important question is how we come to inscribe ourselves in different temporal constructs. What would it mean to consider one’s descent from ANCESTORS? And perhaps more acutely, what does it mean to be in the geologic present; that is, a present conceived as geological? These questions pertain to the existential legitimacy that our deep-time narratives possess. We speculate that a matter-of-factual way of presenting objects alongside a theory-fictive narration may be part of the story by effectively repurposing the aesthetic mode of museums for cultural and natural history. Their kind of matter-of-factual presentation can be used to simulate the sort of relation that holds between the pyramids and the field of Egyptology and to project a transcendent time in which temporality must be reconstructed to be understood. We see also that temporal construction may always be necessary, even in the case of the pyramids. In hearing that objects—urns, mummies, and other creatures—come from an unknown time or are headed toward another, the listener faces the task of filling in the blanks, of constructing a time beside their lived time. The veracity of the represented times is, at least from our methodological viewpoint, secondary to the narrative operation of the temporal heist itself.
CONCLUSION
By attaching itself to objects, theory-fiction can center its own spatial unfolding in spaces like museums. As we have already hinted, it may be that the Anthropocene—alongside the rest of the geologic time scale—functions in the same way as Rahal’s excavated objects, as an enforced temporality demanding a reorientation of how we perceive the present. This is the crux of the object-oriented method we have discussed here. The question which arises when we meet a new temporality, whether geologically anchored or not, is: what does this temporality do to the things I apprehend before me?
But there are other questions, and to conclude we shall try to formulate at least one of them briefly. Based on what we have discussed, the construction and presentation of temporalities can be seen as an art with its own history and criteria, not so different from painting or basketry. And if there are such criteria and if Rahal’s practice displays a certain level of mastery over the weaving of time, the follow-up question should be “Why”? This is an empirical question that could be directed toward other narratives too, which makes it relevant for geographers interested in narrating deep time simply because the notion of deep time and its deployment belongs to the same group of practices. By centering the object as a sort of anchor in this process, we hope to have provided a glimpse of where further inquiry can begin the task of unraveling how we can manipulate our place within time. Yes, we always move through the present, but our movements can only be understood in relation to essentially manipulable, specific, and exchangeable images of time and space that serve to embed our motion. The Anthropocene, too, is the enactment of a temporal heist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Puja Vaish, director, Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, who curated ANCESTORS. ANCESTORS was made possible with the generous support of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Art Foundation.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carl Christian Olsson
CARL CHRISTIAN OLSSON is finishing a PhD in human geography at the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]. He is a researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice and contributed to the second cycle of The Terraforming at Strelka Institute.
Sahej Rahal
SAHEJ RAHAL is primarily a storyteller. E-mail: [email protected]. He weaves together fact and fiction, to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives shaping the present. This myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, and AI programs that draw upon folklore, archeological records, conspiracies, and sci-fi rendering scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilization.
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