Soon after moving to Los Angeles from Berlin I was struck by something very simple about the place, which no one talks about much, and that is that L.A. is at the back of the world’s day. L.A. is fifteen hours behind Beijing, twelve hours behind Mumbai, nine hours behind Berlin and three hours behind New York. This means that myriad events have occurred in the world, and often reached their conclusions, before Southern California has woken up.

L.A. is a place where one gets used to considering events that are new, with a kind of built in hindsight. One has an Olympian view of the world. At breakfast time one encounters news stories from Europe as fully formed. They are already achieving socio-cultural sedimentation, as it were. The “just past” is therefore experienced as the “brand new”. This is the privilege and the detachment of living through younger days.

That the narrative factory of the western world, Hollywood, lives its days out under the sun of this “always already” experience of time, feels just right. There are advantages to being up early when you are late. Personally, I experienced an enhanced sense of temporal abstraction in Los Angeles. I became more aware of each sunrise and sunset and of the phases of the moon, and I found myself making a visual art project that elaborated itself in daily units. I thought more clearly about death too, and the peculiar circumstance of being currently alive.

The city is famous for its superficiality, but my core state felt deepened there. The thinness of appearances is so apparent, it is like the thin skin of the city itself, stretched out so superficially, and precariously, over the ancient landscape on which it is built and of which one remains exhilaratingly aware.

In The Youngest Day I hope to bring together works that foreground these enhanced existential tremors to be felt in Los Angeles, to see how they resonate in older Berlin. Stressing the extremities of the ancient and the youthful when brought into combination, both socio-politically and within individual lives.