Fiete Stolte

Fiete Stolte
(b. 1979, Berlin; lives and works in Berlin)

8 Sunrises / 8 Sunsets.
2007

16 Polaroids on cardboard, print on paper, 23×19 cm each
Courtesy of artist

One of the palpable bodily reactions to the contraction of space into a shorter time is a contemporary physiological condition known as jet lag. In an effort to make the lack of a universal time similarly tangible, artist Fiete Stolte set off on a Sunday in 2007 from Berlin to the east and returned the following Sunday, bringing back with him sixteen polaroids with an equal quantity of sunrises and sunsets. Having proved that the eight- day week really did exist, Stolte went further in his conceptual investigations and, in the next few years, lived according to the alternative time schedule he had discovered: his days were 21 hours long and the week had eight days. Although the artist’s week contained the same number of hours as the seven-day week, his daily routine and what he called “high noon” became out of sync with time in the rest of the world.

Before us we have a proof, but does it mean there is more time out there to take? Does the synchronization of clocks and conformity of calendars mean that if we can cheat our mind, we can also cheat our body? So where is time located, and does it travel with our bodies too?

SK