Making Time is a multidisciplinary storytelling project by curator Tessa Beck. Through digital media and IRL shows, we’re building both real and imagined spaces to mark time, share ideas, and cultivate a sense of collective agency as we navigate the highs and lows of humanity.  

Making Time’s podcast, newsletter and interviews center artists in the discussion of their work, opening up the inner workings of their lives and practices to an audience that would otherwise go unnoticed. It’s an intimate look inside the minds of the region’s emerging creative voices. As the project develops, I look forward to more collaborative opportunities and physical manifestations of our shared time, including catalogues, exhibitions, performances, readings, parties, screenings, and whatever else we can dream up together.

To create at all amidst the harsh backdrop of contemporary society is a radical act of optimism. As we grow together, I’m reminded that the Greeks had two definitions for utopia: eu-topos, meaning “the good place,” and ou-topos, meaning “the place that cannot be.”

I’m interested in how artists create abstract spaces and stages to gather, ask questions, and take refuge when needed. I think of utopia as the agency we have in mining the euphoria from the everyday. I think of utopia as the structural integrity we bring when processing turmoil or massive tragedy. I think the ability to imagine this “third place,” where relief, curiosity, or love might exist when it seems permanently vacant, is necessary for survival — and something artists have a particular knack for cultivating. 

I’ve found a deep love and reverence for the objects, ideas, and relationships I’ve collected in this pursuit and sense that my endeavor to record and share this experience will be worthwhile. 

Because, though as humans we’ve evolved the ability to produce or alter nearly anything, the one thing we still cannot make is time.