Locked Up in Time

A photobook by Yoana Kaloyanova, Irene Pérez Toribio, Eva Gil Álamo, Laura García Rodriguez and Hannah Thompson. Link to the work.

“He is me and I am he. All of that was or ever shall be.”

-Time, ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’

What is Time?

We surely are not the first ones to ask this question and we doubt we will be the last. Time is a paradox which has been studied and reflected on for thousands of years now. However, philosophers and scientists do not seem to have reached the answer yet. But who better than them could explain such a complicated concept in the simplest possible way?

We decided to refer to a childhood classic, a book so simple and so complicated at the same time, that we chose to use it as a guide in our journey. We are referring to the infamous “Alice Through the Looking Glass”. Seeing how Time could even be presented as a living creature, we thought “What if…?”. What if time took form? What if we could see it not only as clocks, but also in the reflection of a mirror, wearing a dress and spinning around, or even as a toy to be played with? What if we included all these notions in one place?

“Locked Up in Time” is an abstract project which we decided to create in order to reflect on the concept of time and its representation – as much from an antique point of view, as from nowadays’ perspective. What we want to transmit with our work is the idea that time as a notion could be observed from a few different angles – each one of them unique and adding to the meaning of the concept itself. Our project, accompanied by the poems we wrote ourselves, aims to present an interpretation of “time”, questioning its meaning through the photos and reaching a point where we leave everything in the observer’s hands – is time real and do we need to be as dependent on it as we seem to be? To this question we purposely do not provide the answer.