video screenings curated by Arie Amaya-Akkermans.
Artists: Gregory Buchakjian & Valérie Cachard / Leyla Cárdenas / Huniti Goldox / Lamia Joreige / Mudassir Sheikh

The concept of ‘deep time' in archaeology is as old as the idea of antiquity, born in the 1860s,
but it has become widespread today in ecology and landscape archaeology, due to the impact of
GIS (geographical information systems), and LiDAR images (light detection and ranging),
identifying previously unknown features of archaeological sites, using a combination of archival
and public domain images and artificial intelligence. In landscape ecology, we hear often that
due to the ‘time depth available from the archaeological record', long-term processes can be
studied at a variety of temporal and spatial scales. But what exactly archaeologists mean by
‘time depth' is far less understood. Chilean archaeologist Cristián Simonetti wrote in 2014 that,
as we move deeper in time, we do not know with precision which direction is implied in this
depth: Is it running downwards, moving backwards, going up vertically, or moving forward?
The passage of time is well conceptualized in stratigraphy as a vertical column, but does this
time column move from top to bottom or the other way around? What happens when the time is
out of joint, and the layers become inverted, or suddenly go missing? The video screening
series is inspired by Colombian artist Leyla Cárdenas' video ‘Interpretation of Deep Time, First
Attempt' (2017) that articulates time as a multidirectional function of the real, physical space. In
the video, the upside down view of a rammed earth wall in the outskirts of Bogotá, is a physical
stratigraphy of time, not simply as a result of erosion, but of spatial and environmental violence.
The traces of human violence and destruction now have geological qualities that have left
permanent marks in the landscape. For Cárdenas, the wounded landscape is not simply a site
of damage, but also a historical and political condition of disorientation that unmakes any simple
passage between past and future.
In the series, “As We Move Deeper in Time: Persistent Landscapes”, we will be looking at video
practices in conversation with Cárdenas, that examine the problem of directionality in time, but
not in the abstraction of linear or metrical time, but rather, embedded in complex assemblages
between nature, culture, history and time, with a particular eye on postcolonial landscapes.
Either landscapes that stand for arenas of reflection for the experience of political violence, or
landscapes that themselves have become rapidly changed by aggressive transformations. In his
book, “Making Time: The Archaeology of Time Revisited” (2021), Gavin Lucas wrote, partially in
response to Simonetti, that movement in time is not only chaotic and unpredictable, but it can
also become suddenly multidirectional, pushing in different directions at the same time,
stretching temporality, and sometimes suspending it or collapsing it. Nature becomes a site of
tension, paradox and discontinuity....
Exhibiting in Tirana these reflections about political violence, either inflicted on the landscape
directly, or re-interpreted through the natural sublime, anchors the question of time depth in a
city undergoing brutal social, economic and political transformations, and which might become
eventually not only unrecognizable, but also unrememberable. The ability of the moving image
to use time as a physical force and sculpt it, even if only temporarily, connects history with
non-human elements as a continuous assemblage of materials, archives and present ruins.
With a greatly expanded notion of historical time, inherited from archaeology, the distant past of
nature might reappear in relative proximity to the political present, and crucially overlap.
Simonetti has called this process, ‘feeling forward into the past': “Concepts of time are not
abstract entities, fixedly stored in the mind, but sentient acts of conceptualization that depend on
the dynamic field of forces in which things and people become entangled.”

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