In 1851, French physicist Leon Foucault presented the Foucault´s pendulum at the Paris Observatory, a simple experiment to demonstrate and visualize the rotation of the Earth. In order to make the slow change visible, Foucault spread sand on the floor. The tip of the pendulum traced out its current path on the sand. As time passed, an observer would have had the impression that the pendulum had changed the direction of its swing, while in fact it was the Earth below the pendulum’s plane that had rotated. Foucault pendulum is an artifice based on the supposition that, while the world around us is rotating, a single point in the universe – the one from which the pendulum is hanging – is still. As in Foucault’s experiment, societies create a fiction called reality that seems to be immovable.
The steady writing on the sand produced by time is the starting point for a hypnotic tour through a fictional city, in which the individual and the collective merge in order to imagine the possible, enjoy the unpredictable, and write history. Once Upon Unfolding Times invites visitors to submerge into parallel universes and take pleasure in envisioning a city that is constantly being re-shaped by the forces of each community member. Casualties, causalities, futures and pasts compound a history that is not based on the fear of the Other but on the joy of sharing with the others.
