Time, displaced

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single channel video · 4K · 20 min · color · quadraphonic sound
Spanish spoken, English subtitles.

‘Time, displaced’ is a research project and a fiction film about a real nuclear reactor in Colombia, a story in which various realities, at opposite ends of various spectrums, collide.

When an atomic clock inside a nuclear reactor in Bogotá lags for one second – an event that happens once every 30 million years – two characters begin listening to strange sounds that no one else hears. Time is displaced and continually disputed for the protagonists, as they pass their days under the influence of a decades-old nuclear reactor, a relic of the Cold War holding nuclear waste with a millenary half-life, and the millions of years required for the formation of mountains, which are studied at the reactor, at the atomic level.

Radioactivity and applications like geochronology are used as props to explore the paradoxes of trying to visualize phenomena that we cannot directly hear, in a medium in which we can’t directly see them. This translation, or poetics of displacement, taps into the present cultural, mystical, and political consequences of such technological deployments in Latin America.

Rijksakademie Open Studios, installation view, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, 2023.
Photos: Sander van Wettum & Juan Arturo García