Exhibition: A Story of Speed
curated by Cayetano Limorte

Cayetano Limorte, a visiting researcher conducting research on Japanese experimental filmmakers, curated an exhibition titled “A Story of Speed”.

“A Story of Speed”
Exhibition Period: 4.18(Fri) – 5.18(Sun), 2025　
Open from Friday to Monday
Hours: 12pm-6pm
Free admission
Venue: Zuiun-an, 62-1 Kamigamo Minamioji-cho, Kita-ku, Kyoto-shi, Kyoto
Website:
https://www.n-foundation.or.jp/exhibitions/2025-a-story-of-speed

In 1964, a key year in Japan’s contemporary history, media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out that ‘just as work began with the division of labour, duration began with the division of time’. And for this purpose, the clock is the machine that produces uniform seconds, minutes and hours on an assembly line. When treated in this uniform way, time is separated from the rhythms of human experience, and the clock contributes to the creation of a numerically quantifiable and mechanically controlled universe. Not without reason, during the Paris Commune of 1871, insurgent Parisians, including some artists, fired their guns at the clocks in the city’s towers. But more than a century later, we are even more aware that the rhythm of the capitalist machine is the cause of a progressive deterioration of cultural identities towards a homogeneous global culture, as well as the cause of a myriad of chronopathologies and the general degenerative deterioration of the body, systematically exploited by the cadences of work, often leading to depression and suicide. Disorders that are now very widespread, caused by the normalised stress from which capitalism itself knows how to extract profits through the pharmaceutical, wellness and entertainment industries. The artworks in this exhibition point to these phenomena and to the possibility of decelerating and recovering one’s own rhythm.