At the 2014 Taipei Biennale, Nicolas Bourriaud stated that what interests artists of our time is no longer things, but the circuits that distribute and connect them. Lina Rica is interested in how individuals connect in their environment, and that means the landscape, history, and everything they contain, both living things and places and things. And this action of connecting is itself a speculation about time.

Lina Rica travels to a linguistic game to speculate on time in NOWHERE, if we write it together, or NOW HERE, if we write it separately. In the first case it means NOWHERE and in the second HERE NOW. It is evident that she refers to a transformation of the conception of time in which the here and now, the coordinates that had dominated the idea of space and time in modernity, have now become a volatile, fleeting space and time, ungraspable, or perhaps flowing, in a kind of continuity that crosses the static dimensions of time and space. Precisely, Lina Rica’s work deals with how this phenomenon impacts on individuals, our perception of time and how we manage it in the information age, and addresses the question of the anguish produced by the loss of horizon.

The artist quotes the thinker Boris Groys in her article “Comrades of Time”: “Today we are anchored in the present that reproduces itself without leading to any future. We simply waste our time, without being able to invest it safely, to accumulate it, either utopically or heterotopically. The loss of infinite historical perspective generates the phenomenon of lost, unproductive time. Despite this, one can also approach this lost time as excessive time – as a time that bears witness to our life as a pure being in time, beyond its value within the framework of modern economic and political projections. ” 1

Surely, freeing ourselves from the confinement of language can offer us ways of understanding these overlapping times. As Armen Avanessian affirms, the present is not only represented by the indicative present, nor can we identify it with a single verbal form, that is why he proposes that we get rid of the comprehension a-modal of the time, since what is necessary for an understanding and a practice adapted to the speculative time in which we live are means to transform the verbal forms of the future into verbal forms of the present. We have to understand, he concludes, that language changes the meaning of time, on a material level and ontological, not only linguistic and conceptual.2
Here and now, nowhere … it is not a mere linguistic game but a proposal for the material and ontological transformation of space and time, or at least in the way we experience them.

Mercè Alsina, 2019

1 Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time”, e-flux, 11th of December 2009. Accessible on: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/11/61345/comrades-of-time/

2 Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik (ed.) (2016). The Time Complex Post-Contemporary. Name Publications. Revised transcript of a conversation held inBerlin, 29 January 2016.
p. 53. Accesible on: https://namepublications.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/post- contemporary_intro_sample_small.pdf