Akwidaa Time, 2011/12
A calender in Akwidaa, Ghana, 2011 (left). Akwidaa Time, 2012, remake of the calender from Akwidaa, Ghana; wood, linen, paint, glass, 30 x 15 x 10cm. (right)
Part of ongoing series A Glass of Water (Some Objects on the Path to Enlightenment). A series of works based on weekly buddhist classes in a small buddhist temple located in a basement under a sun tan studio in the east of Amsterdam.
Akwidaa, Ghana, 10 November 2011
In the lesson we learn how to value the ‘now’.
The trick is to live in the now. And given that the future is the consequence of the now and the now
is the consequence of the past, you must do everything in the now as perfectly as possible. That is how you can influence your future and past here in the present.
I’m now in Akwidaa, a remote coastal village in south-western Ghana. It is a fishing village with a few hundred inhabitants at most. There is a school, a village hall-cum-café and a small market. The village seems to be well-nigh self-supporting. People go fishing every day and cultivate their own vegetables and fruit in the fields outside the village. All the fires are fuelled by brushwood, everything is self-made. Even time is self-made: in the village hall hangs a homemade calendar.
It is a wooden case containing three rolls of paper with the days, months and years. You can set the date using a knob on the side. It seems that someone is keeping track, because the calendar indicates the right day precisely. Yet I sense that every day is ‘now’ here.
Back home in my studio I produce a remake of the calendar, the only difference being that the remake has just a single day: Thursday, 10 November.
Akwidaa Time in the book A Glass of Water (Some Objects on the Path to Enlightenment)