The modern world saps our lives of chronology. The city’s surfaces - those that we wander though on the way to and from work or leisure - are wiped clean every day, kept devoid of the detritus of past inhabitants. The internet, the great leveler, flattens out time, so that our access to information exists on a single plane, downplaying accepted physical realities like context or cause-and-effect. Slipping through cracks in the city’s surface it’s possible to find traces of people left scattered around, allowing us to physically touch - handle, or photograph, or even smash - the history of that space. By breaking into derelict spaces where traces of past lives remain intact, entombed, we are able to experience a city’s reality not only in three dimensions, but, with the addition of time, four. As biological creatures accustomed to the normal march of time and the inevitability of growth and decay, it’s suggested, this provides us with very raw emotional fulfillment at a time when those processes are harder than ever to experience tangibly.
