Julieta Aranda’s Clear Coordinates for Our Confusion at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Muac) marks the artist’s first major institutional exhibition in her native Mexico City. The show, curated by Alejandra Labastida, spans two decades of Aranda’s career, specifically focusing on her years-long investigation into time and the politics of imperial systems of measurement—one of the many recurring concepts in her research-intensive practice.
Aranda is based between New York and Berlin. She is the co-director of the publishing platform e-flux alongside its founder Anton Vidokle. She earned her master’s from Columbia University in New York and has had solo shows at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Portikus in Frankfurt and the Francesco Pantaleone Arte Contemporanea in Palermo, among other museums. She has participated in several biennials, including exhibiting her time-based work You Had No 9th of May! in the Latin American pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2011.
Julieta Aranda’s work appeared in the 2011 Venice Biennale Courtesy of Julieta Aranda
The Art Newspaper: How did your interest in time emerge?
Julieta Aranda: I was thinking about jet lag. I was living in Mexico and had not travelled much, so going somewhere and losing and gaining hours was something that stayed in my mind. I thought: “Is it the same hour that I gain or lose? Or what happens to time then?” I was coming back from Japan once and opened the aeroplane window and there was a beautiful sunset. Because of the time that we left, that sunset—this moment that was supposed to last five minutes—lasted 11 hours. We travelled against time. I had this distinct feeling of being suspended in time. Of course, I was not, but it made me think about how clocks are just a measuring device—not how you can sufficiently explain what time is or your experience of time. From that moment, I wanted to understand what time was outside of measuring systems, how it was experienced, and what measuring time had to do in terms of power and politics, capital, religion and labour. When I started working around this topic, I didn’t think that I would still be exploring it 20 years later.
You Had No 9th of May! (2008-15) considers the arbitrariness of time and time zones. What was the genesis of this work?
I had made a work about national anthems when I was in school, seeking to collect instrumental versions of every single national anthem. It sounds easy but gets more complex as you progress to more obscure countries—or at least that was the case in 2005. One of these countries was [the central Pacific island] Kiribati. Finding Kiribati’s national anthem was so difficult that I learned about it in the process, and learned that the residents of Kiribati had moved the international dateline [as the island had been previously split into three time zones]. These are people that have a subsistence, survival economy. All they have is coconuts, fish and atomic explosions—yet they can move time. It just blew my mind.
Time/Bank (2009-present), a film and previously a long-running interactive platform, focuses on economics and the value of time. How did this work begin?
I kept thinking about labour and the phrase “time is money”. It was in the vein of the work [Anton Vidokle and I] were doing—looking at systems, the creation of value and the politics of circulation. We wanted to create an economy based on serving cultural workers that was not just about the time of labour. What is the time of dreaming? What is the time of agonising over a work to find the right gesture? We wanted to give value to time, creating not a need-based but a pleasure-based economy. Anything you wanted to trade on the Time/Bank should be something that gave you pleasure, creating a situation where we could get things from each other that had ascribed value and would enrich us and help with the formation or production of a subject—not just through acquisition, but through exchange. We did it for ten years, then put it on the back burner. This moment seemed like the ideal time to bring it back because of the informal economies in Mexico.
Julieta Aranda, Tools for Infinite Monkeys, 2014-2022 Courtesy the artist
Tools for Infinite Monkeys (201422) is informed by the “infinite monkey theorem”. How does time play into this work?
The work addresses ideas around labour and authorship, and more esoteric questions around the infinite. It’s a trope that, if you give a monkey a typewriter, he will write every single book over the course of the infinite. There’s an elegant mathematical explanation for it, but what perplexed me was: why monkeys? Why animals but not humans? It made me consider processes of othering and owning the labour of someone else. There is this beautiful quote [attributed to Henry David Thoreau]: “All animals are beasts of burden because they are made to carry the weight of our thoughts.” We are always inscribing allegorical characteristics into animals and humanising or animalising them. I found that some visual anthropologists gave six macaques in London a computer to see what happened in terms of the theorem. The macaques proceeded to break the computer within a month, but, within that month, they wrote five pages of text mostly consisting of the letter “S”. I looked at those pages and thought that, if we are going to carry through all this weight of allegory and how we treat the labour of animals, these five pages of text carry all that weight. So, this is an infinite text. The monkeys were exceedingly smart and did not feel like working for infinity so they created this text that somehow contained everything.
This is the first time that you have exhibited your time-related works together. Why did you choose to focus the survey on this part of your practice?
It was not possible to do an all-inclusive [show], so the curator had the idea to use time as the meta-narrative. I wanted to show two decades of my production at the same time, but didn’t know what made sense together. I’m not media-specific, so was there something that tied the works together? Or was I just indistinctly throwing things at the wall, with no arc? I think I did not even want to acknowledge that possibility. Then, as I started looking more closely, I realised that patterns and concepts repeat, and there are many refrains and ritornellos. There are little undercurrents with years of distance. The works are not necessarily temporal but there is a correspondence between them.
- Julieta Aranda: Clear Coordinates for Our Confusion, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, University City, Mexico City, until 11 May
