Life is a sequence of moments, each now giving way to the next. Everything was once temporary, its existence defined not by its duration but by the inevitability of its end. What we might be compelled to call “natural” and “organic” has long been understood through its susceptibility to decay. We now live in a world increasingly dominated by the idea of forever, the ambition of permanence and longevity, stretching and molding time in an attempt to escape our inevitable collective destiny. There are few things that resist this framework. A resource simultaneously abundant and scarce, an emotion that challenges our understanding of forever, that at times forces us to mold and stretch time simply for it to exist. Love.Drawing on Sophocles‘ image of melting ice, Anne Carson reflects on the peculiar relationship between love and time: “The lover’s real desire, as we see in that handful of ice, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a space-time where absent is present and ‘now’ can include ‘then’ without ceasing to be ‘now.’”[1]

In Beneath Our Feet, Carl Otto Linde explores the tension between permanence and transience that exists in love, between our intrinsic desire to preserve and the irrevocability of things passing. There is a fundamental contradiction within desire, the lover, as Carson notes, irrevocably wishes to escape the fundamental principles of physics. Love makes the lover want to bend, shape and distort time, it makes us want to visit moments that have passed, prolong the moments we are experiencing, and make the future promise that our love can exist indefinitely. The lover wants the past to coexist with the present, without either being lost: “Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the ‘now’ of his desire and all the other moments called ‘then’ that line up before and after it. One of those moments called ‘then’ contains his beloved.”[2]

Linde’s works explore how temporality and the broken promise of forever changes not only our perception, but the immediate, sensory experiences of being a body in the world, questioning where one ends and the other begins. Through the subtlety of dried-out contact lenses scattered in the exhibition space, birdsong interrupted by the ticking of a timer, and a wall that evokes both the sense of an unfamiliar loneliness and the potential of a future unburdened by the past, Linde explores the fragile boundaries between desire and isolation. The works question the distance between what we perceive and what we physically experience, and how in the attempt of trying to preserve and prolong things that are inherently subject to change, we might destroy the very dream of forever.

“What would the lover ask of time if he were in control?”[3]

Text by Olivia Turner

[1]Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 1st Dalkey Archive ed (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). 117

[2]Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. 117

[3]Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. 121