What to do with the business of time? From 2020 to 2023, we were forced to face this question by the global pandemic. It will forever mark generations of people in the 21st Century by its unnerving qualities, its obvious malady, and, more to the point of this conversation, what we were meant to understand about time itself and the slow cancellation of the present. Those of us lucky enough to be caught in the headlights of the pandemic, living outside cities, had a different appreciation for our environment than those stuck deep in the locked-down cityscape apartment coffins.

Our environments gave us space that others in cities did not have. Yet, within this was a strange feeling of loneliness, of being extracted from the business of the twenty-first century and dropped into something familiar, but these spaces, open as they were, served as a reminder of the slow drip of sand in the hourglass vial. It also felt like the tentacles of the early twentieth century had slithered up behind us, grabbed us by the neck, and pulled us back to a time when planes were mostly unseen. The sound of automobiles was a remote occurrence: horse Manure, General Stores, Harvest thinking.

The self-sustainability of our lives took on a different shade than previously remembered. We began thinking about pantries, scarcity (toilet paper in particular), and how not committing ourselves to the present gave us a different perspective on the past. Maybe it was just me, but I wondered if the reset was actually a different type of time contagion, one that allowed the necrosis of the past, its seemingly dead and slow time reaching out to us from the distant fog of the past, pulling us back toward something primal by comparison, visceral by nature. Instead of the rush of the present, we entered into the slow unfolding amber of a time we all have to have existed, but whose material and lived visage has been erased through the speed of technology, life, and the pursuit of a different and equally decayed future. Choleric optimism, gangrenous feet, sepsis, spoils of trench warfare, glory of the colonial republic. Architecture two stories tall, and an underground metro, only a vague lisp and wheeze from between steel grates.

In terms of how to approach the question of time, one can only say that things slowed significantly. The velocity of life was replaced by something introspective, and the time we had became more significant, and we were allowed to think through our daily movements, to find ways to deter the globalized clock that we were used to. I started a podcast, read books, and played drums. I tend to avoid people as it stands, so not much has changed for me personally, except that I feel less indebted to other people’s time or needs outside my family. That is what really felt like a blessing. Things had stopped, so though I was still speaking with people, there was a sense of the unknown about when things might start back up at full speed. As nobody knew, our world was caught in an odd form of stasis. And it did start back up in fits and spurts. Different geographies were opening in various ways, some taking longer than others, but there was still this feeling of molasses surrounding all of us and everything around.

Some artists at the time were sequestered in tiny apartments, trying not to go mad. I remember seeing lots of “archive rummaging” as artists tried to spend time getting their work in order. Some people used the time to prepare books they weren’t sure they could make, while others spent a lot of time preparing their COVID projects. In many ways, I wish the Internet had shut down along with the airlines. I wonder what we might have done, what panic may have superseded our thinking for a short moment. Could we have weaned ourselves off the world, its obviously slowing economy, and divorced ourselves from oligarchy by simply detaching and saying Fuck it? It is a fascinating what-if, but no; instead, we ended up with more controls and less money, with the world turning into lizard people and PD files in the wake of it all (joking about the lizards).

Other artists used this time to make significant bodies of work, some of which were influenced by the notion of time and culled from what was at hand. I can think of several COVID-era projects. The ones that tend to stick around in 2025, in my mind at least, are the ones that did not include N95 masks but instead have become metaphors for the time we all experienced and the gravity of these time pressures. In fact, I find the projects that announced COVID-19 itself and its artifacts to be literal, and I tend not to be beholden to the obvious. And with this, I want to introduce Felipe Russo’s Excellent new book Lugar Dito (Editora Meio do Caminho), loosely translated as “this place” or “place here,“ from Brazilian Portuguese. The place in question is the Aveyron Valley in France, where the artist and his family rode out COVID-19 amidst the valley’s quiet climes, nestled along its rivers and a series of twentieth-century farms. To suggest that the area is rural would be fair. Like many of us, Felipe began dealing with COVID by walking, observing, and staying distant from others. These walks, similar to the walks of artist Gary Green in America, provided the stimulus to produce new work.

Lugar Dito is indeed about a place, but it also has a more extensive, more archaic history. The region has been home to ceramics production, livestock rearing, and husbandry from Paleolithic times. It has been the site of Roman encampments and Templar strongholds, and, as a region, it holds millennia of secrets buried in its soil and along its banks. However, considered rural and a great producer of agricultural and gastronomic goods. For cheese lovers (yes, please), the region is known as a significant producer of Roquefort. It also produces saffron. In short, there is a history of artisanal and agricultural life in the area that speaks to labor and inland production; the artifacts of this life surface from time to time along its pathways, rivers, and farms. Metallic objects long since dislodged from their oak handles are kicked up underfoot, and farms, whose sagging sheds and barns, often disused in the wake of the corporate industrialization of farms across France, lie disused, gathering nests of all sorts. Nailed to the wall of these outbuildings are scythes, hammers, and rusting metal tools that once cultivated the food for a nation.

Worth pointing out in Felipe’s work in Lugar Dito is that he has captured the essence of the Averyon region during his walks, concentrating on fragments of the landscape, similarly to how he has photographed Sao Paulo, where he lives, but instead of concrete and incongruent and accidental scultpures crafted from the cityscape, he has used his camera to capture fragments from the natural world, spider holes, riplles across the surface of waterways, and the odd bent trunk of a tree. These images isolate Averyon’s feeling within its closed-circuit landscapes. He does not make images of the open landscape, as the isolation of its parts is what is dear, what is super-local to his time in France.

The second aspect of the book’s concentration is Felipe’s decision to remove tools from local barns and sheds to photograph them as still lifes. They are remarkable not only for their controlled and straightforward light, their abstract presence, or their objecthood, but also for the history they exude. There is the found object, the Duchampian readymade, in the objects that are front-facing and fantastic, but I am also drawn to the implied history of labor within the objects, their worn and used surfaces speaking to us from the 19th- and 20th-century past. These tools that now lie abandoned, during a time of reckoning feel aline again, noticed, observed, and are exalted in front of Felipe’s lens which sheds some secondary light on the area, the idea of work, and perhaps the issues we are facing in the present with our digital economies and our insistance on turning away from land, from ecoloy, and from work, a endeavor so human that it is hard to imagine our lives and imaginations without toil, without purpose. We stand ont he precipice of alot of unused energy as a species, and somehow Felipe’s tool reminds me of this. They slide between timelines in their presence and yet, collude to ask us questions about the future as much as the past.

In thinking laterally about the tools in Felipe’s work, I am reminded of Walker Evans’ Fortune Magazine work, Beauties of the Common Tool, from 1955, and, more recently, of Rodrigo Valenzuela’s machine-like sculptures, with an emphasis on discussions of labor. It would also be remiss of me not to mention David Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers and the gynecological tools featured in it. That might be a slight reach, but given the tools’ deformity in Russo’s work due to rust, deterioration, and aging, I feel there is some correlation between the tools that appear in both bodies of work, whether or not they have a practical function.

I have been paying attention to Felipe for some time, and I always find his books to be incredibly well-conceived and executed. I was fortunate enough on my trip to São Paulo this year to meet Felipe, the designer of the book, and Beatriz Matucl, both of whom I spoke to for Nearest Truth. They have incredible chemistry in their books. Beatriz’s design complements Felipe’s minimalist photographs, and together they produce excellent books. What is perhaps interesting about Lugar Dito, beyond what I mentioned above, is that the book is the result of Felipe working in a different geography. I do believe that shows his flexibility as an artist, especially given how the work was produced. It, along with Garagem, remains my favorite titles in his catalog. Still, everything he creates is pretty spectacular, and there are only different gradients of great work as play—another in a series of significant works produced by the Brazilian master.

MR_261124 001