Kαιρός (Kairos)

When writing to a friend about Ulysses, James Joyce said: "There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present". In this series, we use photography to represent the concept of the 'Eternal Present'. 'The Now' which the Greeks called Kairos –καιρός– to differentiate it from 'time' –Chronos–. The challenge lay in translating into photographic terms an abstract idea as the 'Eternal Present'. Two photos of the Great Buddha of Kamakura gave us the key: we put together two portions of two consecutive photographs which represent a past and future moment with respect to a present time. The 'Eternal Present' is depicted by the line between the two pictures. The perception of this line, like the fact of ‘seeing the present’, can be more or less obvious, but the less visible it is, the further from the truth our reality is. When human beings focus only on the past or on the future, they are unable to 'see' the 'Now'. Only Buddha, in his eternal meditation, seems to exist forever in the ‘Now'. We have created images that are not a faithful representation of reality, but a metaphor of the fact that past and future are not real, just a human invention. The fabric of space-time has no boundaries and exists in a continuum without borders, limits or subdivisions. it is us, humans who invent frontiers due to our limited preception of reality, or our fear of the unknown or of difference.