Friday afternoon, 5 August 2016. The weather is nice. In the intercity to Den Bosch, I read a book I didn't manage to finish on holiday. I can't manage it this time either: Den Bosch is always closer than you think. Again, the walk from the station to the Joseph Quarter takes less time than Google Maps indicated to me. That may have been because, while walking, I was amazed at how busy terraces were in this medium-sized Dutch city on a weekday, and not so concerned with the minutes. Did everyone really have that much time?
Unconsciously, I was preparing myself for the exercise I was going to participate in. I had signed up for Time Loop - a public conversation with strangers. Time Loop is the latest shoot on the tree of Building Conversation, the collective around artist Lotte van den Berg, which engages in the phenomenology of conversation. Lotte van de Berg started this researching and developing collective in 2013 together with visual artist Daan't Sas.
On their site and also during the introduction to the conversation, they say this: "From a keen interest in conversation techniques from different cultures and from a curiosity about how the conversation works as a place for encounter, we started a research project with the central question: 'How do we speak to each other and how might we speak to each other?'. " But now I am getting ahead of myself.
Looking around inquiringly
Arriving at the Joseph Quarter, I find a pleasant festival atmosphere in a courtyard. There are the necessary artefacts: a bar, a few benches hammered together from leftover wood, specially decorated seating areas for performances and shows, and around a piece of furniture that serves as a library, a kitchen shelf and a storage shed, I see some others looking around inquiringly. Like me, they had to report at 4pm to participate in Time Loop.
I greeted some acquaintances, so did others and so time passed. At one point, Lotte asked, "Is everyone here?" Of course, we didn't know either, but no one said "No." Someone from Building Conversation counted the attendees and said we could indeed start.
The background for Time Loop is an encounter with a Native American from the Great Lakes region of Canada who told Lotte that when making an important decision, he consulted his ancestors and descendants. You could only measure the impact of a decision by the impact that decision would have on seven generations before and after you. That idea was so at odds with short-term thinking in the West, the panting that characterises our society, that it would also become the starting point for a theatrical conversation in Building Conversation's series.
Do not suggest
The purpose of Time Loop, then, is to explore together how we view questions that we often do not think through, in the sense of thinking through time, as I flatly interpret the philosopher Agamben. Time matters here, not what we are in the present. We were therefore invited not to introduce ourselves to each other during the walk to the actual location where our conversation was going to take place. A breath of fresh air if you ask me.
In the little room where we arrived, a few things were ready. Low wooden stools. A few higher wooden stools, also tables. Pasted on the floor were nine very straight lines. At the head of the middle line, which was two actually lines, was one of those higher stools. On that little table were pasted nine miniature lines, and stood a couple of wooden bars.
Third space
We were welcomed again by Lotte, who invited us to grab a stool and sit in a circle. She explained that Building Conversation grew out of a need to explore a third space. I now quote from her website:
So we were going to have a conversation in which we did not necessarily have to come to an agreement.
The play of lines was explained to us using the wooden bars on the table. Those bars depicted self-evident participants. The lines moments in time. The double line is the now. The first line next to it 100 years from now. The second line 1,000 years from now. The third line 10,000 years from now. The last line 100,000 years from now. So we would have a time period of 200,000 years to discuss a question. With that, we had to get rid of our short attention span.
Time travel
We then practised time travel by moving collectively across the floor - with its timelines. In a final round of preparation for the actual conversation, we decided which of the three questions presented by Lotte we would discuss. I do not reproduce that question here, because although the question is very important for that moment, it is not for this piece.
At the start, participants choose a spot on one of the lines. Like everyone else, they respond to the question posed by the questioner, who is in the now - and therefore on the middle, double, line. Participants are encouraged to move across the lines, but in our group it appeared that empathising with another time slot - especially if it was further away in the future - required considerable brainpower. Perhaps this encouragement could even become a rule in upcoming performances?
Personal
The conversation itself was fascinating, profound and - without falling into anecdotalism - very personal. For an hour, I was talking to strangers across time about a question I had been thinking about but would never have linked to the surrounding questions that emerged during this conversation. Amazement at the links that people from other time periods made, admiration at the way some could imagine the future, and awe at the oversimplification that arguments from the distant past entailed competed. The actual hour-long conversation flew by.
Time Loop's closing ceremony was one in the now. Literally. All participants in the conversation were invited to stand next to each other on the double line. The space we had given each other in the conversation, the different views we had made our own, the calmness with which we had listened to each other, the passion with which we had represented the view in our time slot, all of these fell away. Suddenly we were back in the now.
Impact
Lotte asked us to answer the question that had taken centre stage with a simple yes or no answer. I believe I was not the only one who suddenly found that very difficult, almost everyone had a thick comma built into their answer and added some side sentences. Indeed, the Time Loop had given us time to weigh up the impact of our answer.
While walking back to the reception venue, there was a familiar atmosphere in our group. As if we had been hanging out with each other for a long time, when in fact we still knew nothing about each other. Perhaps that is why we quickly introduced ourselves to each other in person, and a local resident invited us all to join an activity in his collectively managed garden - we walked past - on Saturday. It seemed like we were trying to catch up on something.
Anonymous intimacy
We maintained that same atmosphere during dinner, serving the soup and salads to each other from the multi-purpose furniture, and continuing to talk. About all sorts of things. Time Loop had taken full advantage of anonymous intimacy; now we wanted to know each other's histories. But even during these conversations, we remained affable and amenable to thoughts other than our own. Time Loop has the rare quality of drawing participants out of their own filter bubble to step in. To initiate actual conversations. To bring about collectivity.
After dinner, coffee and festival beers, I walked back to the train. The route was familiar. At the station, I had to wait for my train, amidst the city's stepping public rolling towards the Randstad. With them, I did not immediately engage in conversation about the essentials. But the manual that everyone participating had been given was in my backpack. Time Loop has time.
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