Forgetting the Year explores the strange confusion that many of us experienced in 2021 when trying to talk to each other about “last year”. Especially before Covid restrictions began to lift, it was common to get confused in conversations about whether “last year” meant 2019 or 2020.

Forgetting the Year collects together our individual experiences of time being distorted and translates them into shareable shapes and textures. We’ll use these to design a unique calendar (all participants will receive a copy) that expresses our collective sense of what time in the Covid era has been like.

Please bring an object with you from home that you have been living with during Covid and that you have found yourself seeing differently than you did before this time. It can be something that you used to use, but stopped using altogether; something you never used as much as you have during the pandemic; something you used to use one way, but now use a different way; something that used to make you sad, but that has made you happy during the pandemic, or it could be something that you used to love, but that you’ve come to hate. Or something you didn’t care about before, but care about now (or vice versa). It could be a book, a sock, a remote control, a beer, a cleaning supply, your dog—it’s up to you to figure what best meets the description—but please bring something that does.

If you feel like it, it would be wonderful if you could also bring some kind of disposable collection of scrap/crap from somewhere that you spend a lot of your time. This could be leaves or sand or unopened mail or weeds or old rubber bands or cigarette butts or empty cans or anything else that tends to pile up in your environment faster than feels reasonable.

Forgetting the Year is presented by ET4U as a part of their TANKEN program.