Timeslips
The seemingly unwavering natural course of a river can be altered via engineering to serve as the legal boundary of territory—with far-reaching effects. While researching Timeslips, artists Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim returned to the same Mississippi site—a levee road in Missouri—twelve months after their first visit and encountered a series of restrictions engendered by such practices. Significant flooding had rendered the road inaccessible. The film Timeslips takes such scenarios and fast-forwards them into a speculative future, in which a scientist on Mars reflects back upon the injustices wrought by attempts to control water on Earth.
Too many of us take the availability of water for granted.
Farmers don’t. People who live in arid locations don’t. People who live in communities where every day they must transport water to their homes don’t.
In the past, people fought over water, at the personal level, at the community level, at the regional level, at the international level. They still do, in situations ranging from drought to flooding. Injustices are repeatedly perpetrated by people over other people because of something connected to water.
Timeslips is a thought experiment: the viewer is placed in the mind of a scientist on Mars, whose mission is to bootstrap agriculture in a place where the plenitude of water on Earth is a distant memory. Her recollections take on dreamlike and sometimes hallucinatory qualities. Real and imaginary floods intermingle. Martian dust storms devastate a pumpkin crop. She hears the amplified sounds of underwater insects as the pond they live in is transformed into an Impressionistic waterscape. And she feels the baleful gaze of the multitude of victims of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 haunting a field that resembles a cemetery for disused machinery.