If Disrupted

Spectral Temporality

Ernst Bloch coined the term Ungleichzeitigkeit which can be translated as non-simultaneity or non-synchrony. Bloch explained it by saying that not all people exist in the same temporality. Even though we can observe each other simultaneously, it does not mean that we live at the same time. Today, different layers of time can operate, although in different sequences. Most often, they work ‘from behind’.

Existence in non-simultaneity reminds me of the last 30 years of independent Belarus, which also corresponds to the development of computer games during the same period.

The Middle Ages, modernity, various historical plots and never-ending war still exist with us in one place and at one time. Soviet tanks can drive around the post-war city and monuments to fallen soldiers can be more alive than all the living.

Bloch speaks of such spectres of history: ‘Over and above a great deal of false nonsynchronism [non-simultaneity] there is this one in particular: Nature, and more than that, the ghost of history comes very easily to the desperate peasant, to the bankrupt petty bourgeois; the depression which releases the ghost takes place in a country with a particularly large amount of pre-capitalist material.’.

For me, these ghosts are like computer ‘holograms’ from different times, superimposed on each other and still arguing their version of history. That is to say that there are actually more ghosts than just simply the ‘spectres of communism’. Perhaps, we need to now talk not about different temporalities but about the many spectres of our current time. (Uladzimir Hramovich)

Artists
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas
Museum of Stones
Oleksiy Radynski
Uladzimir Hramovich