Time Travel: Life is somewhere and sometime else

TIME IS A BOOK is a project founded by artists Dirk Braeckman and Els Dietvorst. Time Travel spread over 300 books internationally. deBuren went to Bucharest and posed these questions to four young artists. Can art be engaged? Can you, as an artist, still be radical? Today, photografer Jean-Lorin Sterian responds.His pictures are shown below. When deBuren asked him why some of the pictures are blurry, he replied: "Indeed some of the pics are blurry. They were taken with a non-professional camera and I didn't intented to make it pro, exactly like tourists does. Most of the time, tourists keeps even the worst pics, they can't be objective. Cause' I was a metatourist, my 'album' is alike."

In 2009 I spent more than four months in Berlin and one month in London.  I went to Berlin without knowing anyone and having any  purpose except that of being out of my hometown.  But Bucharest came to me through of friends, relatives, former girlfriends. Each of them discovered the city which for me was no longer a foreigner. Being there for the third time, I wasn’t turned on anymore by the Panorama, the Mauer Park or the Brandeburg Tor, although I’ve been so happy on the first day that I could have danced in the streets that was no longer in Romania. I became a guide for my visitors, showing them, inevitably, mostly the same places: those which appear in In Your Pocket guide or on tourist websites. Places that everyone arriving in a city wants to see and capture, thus proving their friends that they’ve been there.Whenever I had a guest I had to go to Oranien Strasse, to the monument of the Holocaust or to the Sony Center, I started observing the tourists deluging public spaces, the density of cameras per square foot, the never ending clicking and rising arms anticipating the exposure; the physical and behavioral changes people suffered in order to push a button; the conversations interrupted unexpectedly when a sight or situation worthy to be captured turned up;  the present process which in the future would become memory.I became, as Kafka would say, an observer of the observers. I started frequenting again the areas which aroused the flashes of cameras. Though I was living in the most populated places in Berlin or London, Alexander Platz or Trafalgar Square, I felt like being the only man alive among zombies hungry for images. A clicking person is extremely fragile. I often approached them to the limit of indiscretion. Taking a photo is an act of isolation in a public space; it’s like listening to music on headphones. With a camera in front of the eye one sees without watching. At that moment you never question reality. You produce directly for the memory. Here and Now become Then and There.