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Julieta Aranda: You Had No Ninth of May!
Sala Diaz, San Antonio
Spring 2008
Julieta Aranda’s new work, You Had No 9th of May! underlines the rigidity of our construction of time, and proposes as an alternative several material representations for it. Aranda's primary source is the elusive International Date Line (IDL). The peculiar zigzagging course of the International Date Line in fact bends forward a day and back across the South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati, causing an aberration in our assumed time-space continuum (in 1995, the archipelago decided to move the dateline so that its territory would no longer be split between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’). This temporal spasm in the IDL, and Kiribati’s power to literally ‘move time’ becomes the blueprint for Aranda’s installation and the basis for a configuration of both narrative and abstracted elements including wall drawings, diagrams, models and props, and a newspaper designed after Kiribati’s own (NEWSTAR) which brings together a collection of articles that cover the subject from several perspectives from the 1920s until today. There is also a resource library with a small selection of books dealing with alternative constructions of time including the Chronicles of Magallanes’ Circumnavigation, Borges’ “New Refutation of Time”, Liam Gillick’s “Erasmus is Late” and several essays on Zeno’s Paradox amongst other titles.
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