As the year draws to a close, a poem of Lina Bo Bardi has stayed with me since I encountered it in ‘What Freedom Means To Me’ – an inspiring celebration of the multi-screen films of Isaac Julien at Tate Britain, London this summer.
The Italian-born Brazilian architect wrote : ‘Linear time is a western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement where, at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.’
I like to think of time like this because it encapsulates the need to avoid becoming a slave to deadlines many of which are self imposed.
Taking time is important in order to be open to possibilities and free to improvise.
Last month, during a one week trip to London, I spent around three hours happily immersed in several multi-screen presentations of Isaac Julien’s films at the ‘What Freedom Means To Me’ exhibition at Tate Britain.
The film that made the biggest impression on me was ‘Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement’ from 2019, based around the life of the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect who died in 1992 aged 78. If you want to know what dancing about architecture looks like, you should watch this!
Bo Bardi is played by two actresses, movingly contrasting her as a young and older woman. The older self is played by Brazilian stage, television and film actress Fernanda Montenegro who, at the end of the film, recites lines from Bo Bardi’s correspondence in the form of a poem: “Linear time is a western invention. Time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”
Angela Rodel and Georgi Gospodinov
These words resonated with me and I think subconsciously prompted me to purchase a copy of Time Shelter (Времеубежище) by Georgi Gospodinov which was on prominent display in Foyles Bookshop as the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize . The novel was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and is Gospodinov’s third novel to be published in English.
