First of all, Raquel Friera graduated with a degree in Economics. Then she worked for companies that set a target for sales, which got bigger every quarter. It was there that she understood how productivity works, from inside the machinery. She then began a degree in Fine Arts, because she felt that this was something else, from another world, from another time. And then she continued to study, in a different way.

Her artistic projects started by blowing away everything she had learnt in that Economics degree: Sobre perder el tiempo (2007), Maltepe (2007), Tiempo libre (2009), Habana-Guáimaro (2010). These were followed by other projects that denounced the various devices for social control: internment centres for migrants, racial and religious identities and economic morality, among others. Feminist thinking has become more and more important to her work and has finally helped her to synthesise her questioning of time as an essential device for the production of subjectivity in our societies.

Xavier Bassas has worked as a lecturer in French Studies at the University of Barcelona (where he has experienced insecurity and time poverty). He has also worked as a translator of French thought (insecurity of euros per translated page, but with fantastic publications) and he is a vocational philosopher (closer to the philosophers of the 18th century than today's academic philosophy). In addition to his numerous translations and publications, he has recently published two books: Jacques Rancière. L’assaig de la igualtat or ‘Essay on Equality’, (also in Spanish, published by Gedisa) and a conversation with Jacques Rancière entitled El litigio de las palabras. Diálogo sobre la política del lenguaje (Pub. NED, 2019). 

Together with a number of others, Raquel Friera and Xavier Bassas have proposed the founding of the Institute of Suspended Time (ITS). It is a project that combines the media of art and the questioning of philosophy. A life project, for at least three reasons: because it brings together their life as a couple with research and their everyday struggle together (‘the personal is artistic’); because they know when this project officially begins – now in the MUSAC, its first headquarters – but they do not know if it will finish, due to the magnitude of the panorama, at some time in their lives; and finally, it is a life project because, transversally, the Institute of Suspended Time is about the life of everyone, from babies to the elderly.

With its (in)action, the ITS is not limited to ‘focusing on life’, as certain feminist thought suggests, but rather understands that focusing on life is placing suspended time at the centre of our lives.

Biography written in 2020