How Shared Ecologies & Sonam Chaturvedi’s New Artist Lab Is Rethinking Time

What if time was not measured by clocks, calendars, deadlines, notifications or any other system that has been put in place to quantify this unquantifiable concept ? What if it could instead be understood through something completely different, the ripening of fruit, the erosion of stone or the decay of a leaf?

These are some of the questions asked by Timekeepers, a new month-long workshop and lab facilitated by Delhi-based artist, educator, and place-maker Sonam Chaturvedi and presented by Shared Ecologies. Beginning on June 20, the programme invites artists to engage with time as a material condition to be worked with instead of viewing it as an abstract concept. 

Drawing from the framework of New Materialism, Timekeepers challenges the human-centric systems through which modern societies have come to understand time. Conventional time-ordering devices such as clocks and calendars divide experience into fragmented units, often aligning daily life with capitalist cycles of productivity and consumption. In doing so, they can distance us from the process-oriented rhythms that govern the material world around us.

The workshop asks participants to imagine alternative ways of sensing and measuring time by paying close attention to objects and materials. What can a piece of wood reveal through its weathering? How does metal rust? What stories emerge from observing the transformation of different materials like fabric, food, soil, or paper? Rather than treating these processes as background occurrences, Timekeepers proposes that materials themselves can become forms of timekeeping — quiet markers of change that operate beyond the logic of minutes and hours.

The programme begins with an intensive in-person workshop at Shared Ecologies on June 20, followed by a series of online and in-person sessions over the course of a month. Participants will engage in readings, discussions, collective reflection, and practical experimentation, ultimately creating their own alternative measures of time through sustained observation of a chosen material or object. The lab will conclude with a public engagement on July 18, where these investigations will be shared more broadly.

Facilitating the programme is Sonam Chaturvedi, whose artistic practice explores questions of time, care, rest, sociality, and collective belonging. Through installations, artist books, socially engaged projects, and collaborative initiatives, Chaturvedi creates spaces for shared reflection amidst the accelerated pace of contemporary life.

Open to Delhi-based artists with at least three years of practice across disciplines including visual art, performance, theatre, sound, music, and creative writing, Timekeepers offers something increasingly rare: the opportunity to slow down, pay attention, and rethink one of the most fundamental structures shaping everyday life

Register for the event here. Follow Shared Ecologies on Instagram.

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