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CHRONOTOPES

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND 2000-2004

By Alex Kornhuber

November 29^th, 2024

CHRONOTOPES

Chronotope concerns how time and space is configured in literature. The word chronotope literally means time/space, highlighting that time and space are intrinsically linked. Chronotopes have the quality to become the “organizing centers” for the narrative events and in that sense, I invoke the word here. Bahtktin (a language philosopher who used the term in his literary critique) talks of “adventure time” a parallel reality or parenthesis. Plots in chronotopes are often formulated by lovers who are separated by remarkable obstacles (shipwreck, betrayal, class struggle, etc.) but in some essence, everything between them remains unchanged, their love is not in doubt, and she is still weaving when he returns from their adventure.

Bahtkin says of the chronotope:

“Two adjacent moments, one of biographical life, one of biographical time are directly conjoined. The gap, the pause, the hiatus that appears between these two strictly adjacent biographical moments in which the entire novel is constructed is not contained in the biographical time-sequence, it lies outside of time; it changes nothing in the life of the heroes and introduces nothing into their life.”

The time I spent documenting the lives of people in Zurich, was a time out of time and a place out of place in that, I had another private life. Time could seem to stand still for whole days and then I would return to my other life. I also had left my home in Peru to make adventure and my future as a photographer and saw the vortex of the chronotope but managed to avoid its gravity. However, during this time out of time, the most unlikely connections happened, migration broke down well established barriers- I was a Latino; and was accepted as such, meeting and growing close with people I would never have associated with in my life in Lima. Life was difficult in this wealthy country for those without means.

After re-analysis, 24 years later, I realize for the people I was documenting in film, this was also a time out of time and place out of place. These characters were living through time in these places, but they were trying to get to somewhere better, somewhere impossible while they were caught in this chronotope, where time stood still. The homesickness was often palpable and gives rise to tender moments. Drugs and other addictions provided an answer to this problem as was art, music, sex and friendship. However, the party finished, the drugs ran out and eventually the highs were followed by devastating lows where the loneliness and depression were difficult to watch. In one of the richest countries in the world notorious for its pharmaceutical industry, people awoke to the harsh reality that they couldn’t even afford an aspirin for their headache.

Looking at these images, you might imagine the lives of these characters. Remarkably, this chaos happened under the gaze of Swiss ‘time’ order. Some of these characters were able to outstrip the minutes, days and nights spent and are now living back ‘real’ time and place. Some are no longer alive, and some have moved into new adventures and chronotopes.

Occasionally my subjects turned the camera on me, but mostly they tolerated my incessant picture capture and often ignored my work while they got on with theirs.

I have arranged these photographs in groups and in doing so I have created a different narrative about the images. For example, I have taken images of the same person years apart, giving a sense of the passage of time. The groups represent new chronotopes: my interpretation of the lived experience of that time. Sometimes I use the strong colours to express a certain feeling and sometimes the presence of particular characters in different moments. In some instances, an object is the stable part (such as the red sofa) the scene of so much action. It gets moved around and has so many visitors. You can imagine the hearts broken, deals done, and the new romances launched on this sofa.