SNBA - Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes

Rua Barata Salgueiro 36, 1250-044 Lisboa

12 . 09 . 2024 → 12 . 10 . 2024

monday - friday → 12:00 pm – 07:00 pm

saturday → 02:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Curator

Wiktoria Michałkiewicz

One of the most prominent historians of the 20th century, Fernand Braudel, in the 1958 groundbreaking article in the historical journal Annales, launched the term ‘longue durée’ – the long time. Thinking about the multiple temporalities that humans inhabit, the ‘longue durée’ paradigm referred to historical structures that were taking shape in many decades. Time shall be measured in centuries.

The concept was born out of a crisis in human sciences, as Braudel saw it. Instead of looking at the instant of time, or the conventional timescales used in narrative history: spans of ten, twenty, fifty years – he insisted on looking at the cycles, regularities, and continuities underlying the processes of change. This approach applied not to singular events, but emphasized connections instead: across cultures, landscapes, and generations unveiling the delicate web of interdependence that humanity was a part of.

In the report published in 2020 in the magazine ‘Nature’, the authors: Christopher H. Trisos, Cory Merow and Alex L. Pigot, warned of “domino effect” – a massive collapse of ecosystems that might take place in the span of ten years. Long time is shrinking, and we yet again need to move to a different temporal horizon: in which within one life we will face the events that had been witnessed previously in the span of several hundreds of generations. Longue durée is revealed before our eyes.

Only over six decades have passed since the historians of the Annales group initiated a quest to find the relationship between agency and environment over the longue durée. As they claimed, the longue durée is not itself eternal —it has a beginning and an end, within a perspective of one singular “world”.

The visual dialogue embedded in the works of seven featured artists gives a perspective of our interconnected world, and what it can mean to live - and to act - in our new shared temporality: the temporality of Anthropocene.