Stolte's photographic work Studio occupies a central place in his production. For eight days, the artist used a Polaroid camera to photographically record the window of his studio. The artist's choice of such a minimalist image enables viewers to focus on light-both the natural light from outside the studio and the artificial one inside it-and to visualize his personal division of time into eight days of 21 hours each, for a total of 168 photographs. In Stolte's installation Window, four florescent tubes are arranged to create a sort of window embedded within a wall. This work symbolizes the personal progression of "Stoltean" time. Regulated by a timer, the light of the tubes serves as a clock marking the fourteen waking hours and the seven sleeping ones. Here too, light serves as a unit of measure. The window, moreover, is inserted within a wall of the exhibition hall, meaning it does not open onto a real outside world, but rather creates an artificial reality of its own that functions as a self-enclosed system within this artistic context. Stolte's Set series is comprised of a succession of black and white images documenting the eight nights in one of the artist's weeks. The shots start from the midnight of Stolte's day and cover a stretch of seven hours. A camera with a self-timer takes one photograph an hour of the sleeping artist. When the latter wakes up, the camera is switched off. In the foreground is the artist's bed and in the background the window; the two are separated by a semitransparent black drape. Again, light and the interaction between outside and inside are central elements of this work. What powerfully emerges here is the theme of moments of inactivity. Nothing has changed over the past years as much as our relationship with sleep. The drastic fall in sleeping hours that has taken place reflects the contemporary search for maximum efficiency. The latest neuroscientific research is seeking to draw attention to the importance of rest and pauses as moments of mental reorganization that are not ends in themselves but functional to the logic of production and the optimization of work performance.

Fiete Stolte (Germany, 1979)

Since 2006, Fiete Stolte has been working on the idea of an eight-day week: an artificial time unit that is not based on the ordinary partition of time according to the alternation of dawn and dusk. Stolte's day is comprised of 21 hours; by subtracting three hours from each day of the week, he obtains an eighth day. The artist thus lives in a time capsule which is initially parallel to the conventional way of keeping time but becomes increasingly out of synch with it as the days pass. Stolte was led to develop an alternative way of organizing time by his feeling that time passes too quickly and the conventional week is not long enough. The website www.theeightdayweek.com illustrates the means for this new arrangement of time, which should help us live according to the rhythms of a shorter day and longer week. One of the diktats of contemporary society is precisely the minimisation of idle moments, and hence of moments of rest, in the name of increased productivity and activity. It is Stolte's own life, therefore, that constitutes his overall conceptual artwork. What the artist exhibits are only partial illustrations of his work, which symbolically put us in touch with his creative process.