Manito de Guagua: Economics of the Clock, 2023
Time is power. It seems fitting to place this catchy yet complex equation at the center of Manuela Libertad Morales Délano's work Manito de Guagua: Economics of the Clock. Whether it is the ringing of bells with which Christian authority has called believers to regular prayer since the Middle Ages, the emergence of a standardised system of time measurement across Europe through the development of the railway in the 19th century, or the coupling of our rhythm of life to predetermined working hours driven by capitalism - there are many historical episodes that reveal time as a means of control by domination over its subjects. In her installation developed for Plattform23, the artist, who grew up in Chile, focuses specifically on the role of time in the context of imperialist conquests in South America. Through these, and especially through the work of missionaries, the notion of a world marching to the beat of a single drum was carried across the Atlantic, erasing previously polyphonic seasonal, celebratory or even cosmic temporalities: time played a crucial role in sowing the first seeds of a European cultural order and contributed to the establishment of global power relations that persist to this day.
In close proximity to the bell tower of Lausanne Cathedral, Manuela's sun-like dial seems to remind us that clocks do not tell the time, but merely a time. The artist opposes the greedy and time-stealing downward-looking Manitos de Guagua with clenched fists, which refer to the collective struggle for the liberation of time against the market and nationalism. The loaves produced from wheat and salt with different baking times allow an analogy to be made between time and grain as a carrier of global power relations. By distancing herself from the classical twelve-bar division
of a clock face, Manuela raises the question of what shape the clock would take if it displayed a different temporality. Whose definition of time would it follow?
Selma Meuli (translation P23)
[1] «Manito de Guagua» (literally: child's hand) is used colloquially in Chile to refer to greed.
Brot
Photo credits: Margot Sparkes