Hard times
2018
Desktop folder, containing MP3 files
52 MB
Platforms:
Our lives are punctuated by events pinpointed in time. Our life is largely defined by work and our relationship to the cycles of work. Weekdays is the time for parting, weekends is the time for partying. The only time we get to see each other is over the weekends.
Taking the weekend to ourselves is to cease the fight with time, and letting it be unproductive, unoccupied. They come over to my house on Saturday. We be lazy, we make love. But when Sunday comes, we both know they have to leave sooner or later, and it is always dreadful.
"The weekend is an act of corporate trickery, a dangling carrot that keeps workers tethered to their jobs."
We start to miss each other before we’ve even parted. So these songs have become part of our Sunday ritual that we perform to tell each other, ‘I don’t want you to go’, ‘I don’t want to go either, but I have to’. Because we both know we can’t, or shouldn’t explicitly say, ‘please don’t go’, ‘please stay’, ‘please don’t hurry’, because we’ve learnt we can’t, we shouldn’t (or maybe we should). Because it appears as counterintuitive when there is compulsion. The next day awaits, and it demands us to get ready for work. The sooner they leave, the sooner we both can catch up.
If 70’s feminists taught us anything, it’s that the personal is political. There is something systemic going on. Today, love is not “pure” or “free” but shackled by a system of misery, oppression, and exploitation. This playlist finds us a language to communicate instincts, time, being the capitalist construct that it is, guilts us for desiring and expressing that desire. 'Hard times' explores the tension between time and desire, or rather, the unfulfilled desire due to the construction of time through Urdu music.
The MP3 files in this folder carry messages in the paratextual spaces of the operating system that will walk you through our experiences.
