BANK & RAU

JUST GIVE ME A MINUTE 2023

A site-specific work of 30 matchstick figures in an ancient Dutch landscape, measuring human time against nature's deep timescales through the trivial gestures of everyday life.

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In the installation JUST GIVE ME A MINUTE!, 30 matchstick figures inhabit an open field between two burial mounds dating back to 3400 BC. The figures — humans and pets — are frozen in recognisable everyday postures: bending, reaching, picking things up. Around them, the props of modern life: laundry baskets, ladders, tennis balls. Trivial artefacts from a time measured in waste production, toilet visits, and growing piles of washing.

The work is about time — not the abstract concept we attempt to manage with hours and minutes, but time as something physical, bodily, and cyclical. About activity not as planned productivity, but as biological chain reactions. About decay and renewal. About humanity's absurd, neurotic, and sometimes comic attempts to find meaning — played out on a natural stage carrying traces of human life 7,000 years deep.

The 30 figures, built in timber from six original body positions, compose a rhythmic score across the flat landscape — a pulsating pattern of folded and outstretched bodies, visible from a distance along the park's cycling and walking paths. In a landscape now protected as a breeding ground for birds, they stand as dramatic proxies for ourselves: displaced, estranged from nature, but endlessly in motion.