Centre for Contemporary Culture at Palazzo Strozzi
Palazzo Strozzi
STANDARD TIME / Installation for Palazzo Strozzi Courtyard
Mark Formanek /STANDARD TIME
Installation in the Courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi on the occasion of the 2014 Florence White Night
The Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence) will be contributing to the Florence Sleepless Night event on Wednesday 30 April 2014 by suspending a video installation by Mark Formanek entitled Standard Time in the centre of the Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard.
The video shows a typical suburban area in which seventy workmen are frantically involved in the construction of numbers. They ceaselessly build and dismantle four large numbers made of wooden planks twelve metres tall, forming a clock that works in real time. The numbers change as each minute goes by, creating a complete system for measuring time: a fully-fledged clock operating in sync with real time in the space in which the work is displayed.
Originally devised as a performance held in various cities such as Berlin and Rotterdam, Standard Time prompts us to reflect on man’s relationship with time and the concept of production.
The workmen’s activity becomes the unit for measuring the passage of time. Their action, ceaselessly repeated on the basis of a precisely orchestrated team-based pattern, becomes a metaphor of the working and social life that marks each individual’s existence. The installation can be interpreted as an analogy of the very notion of productive activity in terms of its dual nature: the creation of something new, and the simultaneous destruction of an initial element or stating point. The workmen are always on the verge of failing in their mission, because if the number showing the time is not ready at the right moment, they have to move on to the next one. Their frenzied activity becomes a source of anxiety, albeit peppered with amusement, for the observer: time flows by inexorably and we never know whether the workmen will manage to complete their job on each occasion.
Standard Time will be visible free of charge in Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard from 17.00 on Wednesday 30 April to 2.00 on Thursday 1 May 2014.
On the occasione of the Florence White Night , Palazzo Strozzi’s two current exhibitions, Family Matters and Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino will remain open until midnight (last tickets sold at 23.00) with a special joint ticket costing € 5.00, on sale from 19.00.
INFORMATION
www.palazzostrozzi.org
www.strozzina.org
Tel. +39.055.26.45.155
news@strozzina.org
Photo credits:
Datenstrudel und Marc Formanek
STANDARD TIME
Berlin August 2007
Foto: © Bernd Schuller 2007
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