Alex Cecchetti: A Society That Breathes One a Year

A man and a woman begin the project of building an isolated, self-sustainable farm, cut off from civilisation. Against all expectations the first thing they have to confront is the construction of a road, and the constant reminder of the present left behind.

Through a non-linear narrative, the two protagonists drive through the tawdry present, only to realise a future set deeply in the past. Their meagre provisions and inexperience places them at odds with survival, but at one with a mesmerising fiction. Haunted by the spectres of dead rabbits and a prophetic bear the couples utopian dream is delivered in a rapid, dense stream of language as if the text itself wants to return to the pace of present.

A Society that Breathes Once a Year is commissioned as part of The Time Machine, selected and edited by Francesco Pedraglio from open submission. The Time Machine is a project that asks us to forget about archives and embrace the confusion of the present, in order to consciously experiment with all our imaginable histories and expected futures.