12 Months — A Year

Format: Film
Premiere: 30 Nov 2021 — 31 Oct 2022
Venue: itsabouttime.berlin, Ballhaus Ost
Language: English (with English subtitles)
Duration: 60 min, in 12 chapters of 5 min



Direction, text, performance, edit: Chris Gylee & Aslan
Performance: Amber Fasquelle, Rosemary Joy, Cicely Parnas
Stills photography:
Óscar González

Part of the online durational festival It’s About Time.
It’s About Time is a Ballhaus Ost production, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

Time is something that scares me … or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.
Felix González-Torres, 1991

12 Months — A Year is a durational film project by ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS made as part of the online festival It’s About Time

Starting in November 2021, Aslan and Gylee will create and release a five-minute film every month for one year. Each monthly chapter will be released on the final day of the month and will add to the previous films, accumulating in real-time. The full 60-minute work will be completed and released on 31st October 2022.
12 Months — A Year is inspired by durational artforms including the soap opera, the serialisation of the novel in the 19th century, films that stretch and compress time (Empire, 24-Hour Psycho, The Clock, Boyhood), and the inevitably diverging clocks of González-Torres’s sculpture Untitled (Perfect Lovers).

Simple questions with formidable answers: We ask who we are now, who we will be a year from now, and what the nature may be of the trajectory between these two points in time.

This was fiction and yet no one knew where the story was headed because time was its unpredictable collaborator.Kate Kellaway, interview with Richard Linklater & Ellar Coltrane, 2014









The above images include stills taken from November, the first part of 12 Months — A Year.

12 Months — A Year is a ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS production in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost, commissioned for the online durational festival It’s About Time.

Additional thanks to: the team at Ballhaus Ost; Mars Dietz; An*dre Neely; Jo Zahn; Kunsthaus KuLe; The Watch, Berlin; Silence Residency and Kaukonen village, Finland.