Losing time

A project for our time, our jobs and the future of labour

The social perception of time is a construct formed over the course of past centuries that was mainly based on the needs of capitalist, commodified labour. Work and non-work time were radically and violently separated, which had an important impact on our psychology and our very existence

Podcasts

Season 1: Losing time - A week before the future of labour

Maro Pantazidou’s and Paris Selina’s podcast series “Losing time” includes 4 episodes, each dedicated to a moment of the week, and it deals with different aspects of this pivotal subject that determines our lives in so many different ways (language: Greek)

Losing time: A week before the future of labour #1 Monday morning

PODCAST The first episode looks into how contemporary forms of labour organise the way we face, measure, and experience time through the question of “why do we hate Monday mornings so much?”.

Losing time: A week before the future of labour #2 Thursday midnight

PODCAST Who is taking care of the city on a Thursday at midnight? In this second episode, the economy of the night is opening a door in time, not as an individual resource but as a relationship, both with people we know and with strangers.

Losing time: A week before the future of labour #3 Saturday noon

PODCAST The third episode starts off with the angst of “having a good time on the weekend” and ends up wondering what it would mean to have truly free time and how it would be to conceive of time as a continuum.

Losing time: A week before the future of labour #4 Sunday afternoon

PODCAST The fourth and final episode opens with the Sunday blues, asking how we can turn time towards new directions and what all these mean for a collective future with less labour.

Season 2: Losing time - Three time experiences

In the second season of "Losing Time" Maro Pantazidou and Paris Selinas deal with three aspects of work today, in order to ask how we want to share our time tomorrow. Seasonal work, care work and education are approached as three mirrors of contemporary work but also as vehicles for possible time transformations (language: Greek)

Losing time, interim episode #The time thing

PODCAST This interim episode summarizes and extends the first season of "Losing Time", as it is made up of the listeners' answers to the questions posed in those four episodes. Confessions, testimonies and reflections make up the field to ask: "And if time is not money, then what is it?"

Losing time, season two #1 Seasons and seasonal work

PODCAST In the first episode we circle around seasonal work. What's it like to work seasonally in the Greece of hyper-tourism? Which seasonal jobs are less prominent? Did we used to work more or less?

Losing time, season two #2 Collective health

PODCAST In the second episode we visit a hospital and then a small rescue aircraft to see what form the time of the caregivers takes. But at what cost? Who cares for those who care?

Losing time, season two #3 Diverse knowledge

PODCAST In the third and final episode we talk to academics and university workers and ask how we can connect theory with practice, experimentation with reflection, intellectual with manual work.

Publication

Losing time – The zine

ZINE

This is a small handmade publication, a zine, that frames and expands through words, colours and images the podcast series "Losing Time", about time, work and their entanglements. It is a mosaic composed of extracts from the podcasts, texts written in digital notebooks by listeners and material created in the context of two workshops in Athens and Thessaloniki in the spring of 2023. This publication is a creative reformulation of all the above material.

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These writers’ articles shed more light on the matters of time and labour, and we can find extra information, food for thought, and a rich list of references

Free Besieged Time: Our holidays, the 4-day workweek, and a year otherwise

ARTICLE

The social perception of time is a construct formed over the course of past centuries that was mainly based on the needs of capitalist, commercialised labour. Work and non-work time were radically and violently separated, which had an important impact on our psychology and our very existence. This article points out that time is absolutely central to the debate on the transformation and future of labour.

By Paris Selinas and Maro Pantazidou

A short introduction to the politics of time—or why waste some of your time with us?

ARTICLE

This article is an attempt to define time, an attempt to realise that it is a construction with specific implications, both social and individual, for each and every one of us, but also an incitement to reshape the experience of time around, in and out of labour, in directions that produce less inequality and pain.

By Maro Pantazidou and Paris Selinas