49 minutes
Installation, 2024
Timna Lugstein & Denitza Zafirova
For a child scared by the forces of nature, counting the seconds between lightning and thunder as a calming process, might be the first experience of connecting space and time (“so much time in between! it must be far away…”). As it counts, an imaginary thread unfolds between the child and the monster, the later the thunder, the longer the air line thread. And even as you get older, the apparent revelation of physical laws can bring a reassuring order to the chaos of a thunderstorm.
Vienna and Paris are 1033.49km apart. If a sound is sent from Paris to Vienna, imagining aneven surface with no obstacles, it will reach Vienna in exactly 49 minutes, and vice versa.
12 recordings of real life situations, taped on a cassette recorder and sent back and forthbetween Paris and Vienna, allow the other person to hear the ‘thunder’ of something thathas already happened.Every 49 minutes they start playing, triggered by a flash (an actual camera flash, germ.Blitz/bulg. светкавица means both flash and lightning) in the exhibition room. A photographic series captures a performance, inspired by keeping up with the many newversions of self each naturally adopts with the passage of time, enhanced by jobs, studies,relationships, etc. As an artistic duo and friends, Lugstein and Zafirova began a relationship in 2019 in Paris,which went through a change at the end of that year by the move of Lugstein to Vienna. They have since encountered the difficulties of, on the most surface level, missing eachother, on a logistic one – attempting to create together while apart. The project was also developed devoted to the first thought (the lightning), and a project resulting from it (the thunder). The apparent “time in-between” – a time that is filled withwaiting, letting something rest, unconsciously grooming something, an empty time and space, which really is not at all empty, but indispensable for a creative process.