Re: Letter on the Present: Time Since Then, and Now

In this digital residency in collaboration with Érudit, writer and researcher Hanss Lujan Torres explores how time has been experienced and discussed in contemporary art. In responding to an earlier contemplation on the present, written over ten years ago, he employs letter writing as a temporal practice and form of time travel, tracing the evolving discourses on time throughout Esse magazine’s archives.

Montréal, July 17, 2025

Dear Marie-Eve, 

What strange and funny timing. During my digital residency, for which I proposed to explore how time is discussed in contemporary art, I came across your article, “Letter on the Present,” written for Esse’s thirtieth anniversary in 2014. I was pleased, but not surprised, to see writers contending with time’s shifting textures, anxieties, and the persistent intensity of the “now.”

While browsing Esse’s archives, I noticed how reflections on time surface during moments of commemoration and retrospection. Your letter and other articles in the Being Thirty issue grappled with a digitally accelerating present, just as ten years earlier, the Utopie et dystopie issue, marking the magazine’s twentieth anniversary, was also interrogating the feeling of time, but through the hopes and anxieties surrounding the imagined futures of the early 2000s. By the hundredth issue, aptly themed Futurity, those envisioned futures had arrived. Time, it seems, folds inward with each milestone.