TIMELESSTIME by MAISON the FAUX

The complex experience of time and timelessness, lack of time and eternal value is at the heart of TIMELESSTIME by MAISON the FAUX.

Do we lose or gain time with the passing of the years? Does physical deterioration make us vulnerable or is this the very thing that drives us to create, to philosophize, to destroy and start all over again...? MAISON the FAUX addresses this with the impressive TIMELESSTIME at MU Hybrid Art House.

Time and timelessness, lack of time and eternal values, are at the heart of TIMELESSTIME, the largest solo presentation that MAISON the FAUX has put together so far, bringing together all their experience in scenography and fashion, visual art and performance, digital culture and choreography. Periodically performers make landscapes full of stone, rubber, straw and flowers come to life, sucking the audience along as if on a story ride without beginning or end on waves of creation and decay. Thus, outspoken characters and their avatars periodically hold up a mirror to visitors. Waiting, struggling or whirling, switching between exhaustion and lethargy, they engage the audience in their seemingly endless quest.

Ten years on, MAISON the FAUX celebrates the here and now; in fashion, in theatres and museums, with high-profile installations. Not to deny the past, glorify the future or face it with fear, but to break through our conceptions of time and identity and all the rigid systems associated with them. Such is also the case in TIMELESSTIME where they put pressure on time and place in five impressive scenes. These 'epochs' are designed from the realization that we will disappear no matter what. Yet sometimes they manage to stop time for a moment, halt decay and let life solidify, until everything starts all over again. With TIMELESSTIME MAISON the FAUX brings together multi-vocal values and meanings. Precisely because, on the one hand, we seem to become more distant from each other in increasingly hermetic bubbles and, on the other hand, merge due to lightning-fast technology, that is making us loose all sense of time and place. We have ended up in a space of flows and a timeless time, as cultural sociologist Manuel Castells once put it. MAISON the FAUX freely interprets these concepts with their biggest installation so far, making 'timeless time' tangible.

As artists/designers, Tessa de Boer and Joris Suk, both creators behind MAISON the FAUX, are obsessed with the fake, the simulation and the constructed: What makes the real real and genuine and the artificial FAUX? And who determines that? And isn't FAUX also a form of 'queer timing', as Jack Halberstam once defined it: a form of resistance to the idea of linear advancing time that reinforces prevailing systems like capitalism, heteronormativity, whiteness and validism. FAUX as a different experience of time that represents life outside the prevailing 'bourgeois patterns' of birth, adulthood, work, reproduction, success and living as long as possible.

Credits
MAISON the FAUX: Tessa de Boer and Joris Suk
Performances by Arno Verbruggen, Jordan Achiano and Nora Monsecour
Choreography by Tatiana Matveeva
Sound design by  A. Crespo Barba
Art objects Esmay Wagemans and Dae Uk Kim.

https://mu.nl/nl/exhibitions/timelesstime
https://maisonthefaux.com