The School of Losing Time
“Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.” Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 65 AD
The School of Losing Time is a project that enables commoning through the use of time; the resource all humans own. The aim is to position gaming as a strategy for using time outside of market logics, and thus as a way to start to deconstruct the mindset of always having to be productive. As described by Johan Huizinga in his 1949 book Homo Ludens: “we might call [play] a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life… connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it… It promotes the formation of social groupings”. In this way, The School of Losing Time is a project that aims collaboratively to construct ourselves as homines ludentes, and our quotidian life as a life extraordinary. The School of Losing Time uses an online platform that enables participants to share invitations for losing time online and/or in-person, allowing those who decide to play, to map the place of the city where they played and to post the result of the game as images, videos, texts, or audio recordings. The School of Losing Time turns us all into accomplices in the process of imagining, creating, and performing different ways to lose time, starting to construct a commons as described by Massimo de Angelis in “The Beginning of History” ( 2007), and thus activating a society of commoners for future projects.
Join The School of Losing Time at www.theschoolof.wix.com/losingtime
