Kim Dijkstra

In my work I connect with archetypal stories from the past and present.

Both in mass and social media, people obsess over topical subjects. As one subject fades from people's minds, the next one already cries out for attention, appearing just as urgent and important as the one before. By using social media like Facebook and Twitter, people try to stamp their own personality on this eternal ‘now’. Australian philosopher Gay Hawkins refers to this fixation on the short term as ‘presentism’.

Ironically, our rigid fixation on the present might well cause us to lose our grasp of it. Because it is filtered by screens and digital technology, the ‘now’ that we obsess over is a ‘virtual now’. What happens on my screen is different from what I actually see, feel and experience in the real world. The ‘virtual now’ affects our ability to see what is going on right in front of us. It makes our ideas about the world seem more important than the world itself.

Presentism also means an undue attention to present-day attitudes and experiences at the expense of past interpretations and future orientation. Because of our fixation on the virtual now, we lose our connection with a larger timeline, the line that binds past, present and future together.

Throughout human history, archetypal stories have always told us about what has come before, and what may come after. These stories can be told more elaborately and completely by adding sensory elements such as sound, image, movement and other stimuli. My stories are often about a search for freedom, about letting go of the mediated daily turmoil, and going on a quest for an experience that rises above all that.

With my works, I want to invite you to look around and observe what happens in your surroundings, but also to step out of the moment and be aware of the continuity of longer timelines. When observing timelines that link the past to the present and the future, larger tendencies loom into view.

By playing with time in this way, I create perspectives from different eras and bring them into the present - or vice versa. For one of my next projects, I imagine a future that looks back to the present. In this self-created time-space, I find the freedom to tell old archetypal stories and invent new ones.