Timsam Harding (Málaga, 1992) offers a coffee and sits in one of the two chairs arranged on the attic-like upper floor of a warehouse converted into a workshop and refuge on the outskirts of Vallecas, right by the M30. He speaks with the determination and pause of someone who spends much more time thinking than speaking, because Timsam believes the work should be the one to speak, his work, the work he does every day on a street full of car workshops, scrapyards, and warehouses from where a rave bursts out almost every night. And in that tumult, Harding constructs a haven where poligonero aesthetics coexist with Philip Glass, where raw skids on asphalt collide with the cotton-soft melodies of Nils Frahm, with Kiasmos samples and the roar of an angle grinder on a cold autumn morning in Madrid.
From that noise, Harding has composed an exhibition like an invisible score, an archipelago of “listening islands” arriving amid the frenzy of a cultural center that organises more than three hundred activities a year, turning a place of passage into a place of pause, a runway where the flurry of daily obligations becomes, at least for a moment, the possibility simply to be.
A tiempo para la espera offers a carefully distilled overview of Harding’s artistic path to date. His recurring themes appear -asphalt, the road, transit, critical reflections on urban movement…- but here their formal and conceptual treatment takes a new twist, moving toward a kind of stripping-down, a search for essentiality that leaves behind any desire for material heaviness in favor of a crucial impression created through an increasingly rigorous economy of means.
On the century-old hydraulic tiles, between the corridor windows that once sheltered the wounded of the Franco-Moroccan War and hundreds of orphans of the province, Harding installs lightweight, almost weightless “listening islands” made from steel chairs and structures, covered with branches and leaves made from aluminium. Oleander leaves, that tough and poisonous plant capable of growing along road shoulders and ditches without care that Harding has taken as metaphorical material by submerging them into clay-sand blocks mixed with oil to create a silver vegetation like a bullet, like the edge of a trembling blade vibrating with the hidden speakers lodged in metal structures.
Everything seems cold, surgical but nothing could be further from the truth. Random sounds. People speaking underwater, the noise of traffic, the tinkling of falling rain, the faint whistle of blowing across a bottle. A soundtrack nourished by minimalism and electronic music, by John Cage and midweek afters hour clubs in an industrial estate on the outskirts. But here the invitation moves in the opposite direction: stop, listen, feel. Feel that we are “in time for waiting”. After all, “waiting is our first cultural act,” the early murmur capable of crystallizing into thought and intellectual expression, as Andrea Köhler writes in Passing Time, a book that has hovered over Harding’s artistic practice in recent years and whose title seems to merge like those aluminum oleander leaves with the ultimate purpose of this exhibition: Harding’s desire to gift us time, and space, to stop, close our eyes, breathe, feel the vibration of what surrounds us. And listen.
*Extract from the original Spanish text El tiempo regalado de Timsam Harding by Antonio Javier López.