Threads of Time

Explores time as something that seeps, stains, accumulates, and folds back upon itself. The work begins with a physical and intuitive performance conceived as a real-time installation, where three essential elements interact: the body, light, and three cameras simultaneously recording different layers of the experience.

The cameras do more than document the action. They become instruments for measuring time and generating images. Through variations in shutter speed, exposure, and light, the work engages with the tension between measurable time and lived time. This dialogue draws from Henri Bergson’s reflections on duration and Martin Heidegger’s understanding of temporality, where past, present, and future coexist as dimensions of human experience.

The recorded performance becomes the source for a second stage of the work. Selected fragments—gestures, movements, blurred forms, and moments in which an image unexpectedly emerges—are brought into dialogue with a personal visual archive composed of screenshots, collected images, and fragments preserved over time.

These images then move from the digital into the material. Aged papers, marked textiles, and other surfaces carrying their own traces of use and memory become part of the process. Through painting and mixed media, the original performance is transformed into new images where different moments, memories, and materials accumulate.

Threads of Time unfolds between movement and trace, presence and memory, the body and the image. Rather than attempting to represent time as a linear progression, the work approaches it as a layered experience—something continuously rewritten through what remains.

The body leaves a residue.
The screen leaves an echo.
The image becomes a fold in time.

The viewer encounters the work at this threshold, suspended between what has already happened and what seems about to occur.

©2007 Copyright - ILIAN ARVELO, All rights reserved