Trauma prevents realities from aligning with themselves. Pain stops the puzzle pieces from fitting and forming a full picture, so the soul returns to the scene of its scarring over and over. Clarissa Thieme enters these loops of troubled remembrance: There is a video she found in the Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive that collects footage of the siege of Sarajevo, filmed by Nedim Alikadic. It shows militia men by a river in a residential area. “Film them!” Alikadic is being urged by his companion. Handheld, the camera nervously moves, pans, and stutters, as it seeks to connect to the threat before it. It is this particular camera movement that Thieme tracked with advanced digital image processing technology. The resultant meta-data now control an automatic arm and make it move a ray of light in exactly the same way the hand shifted the camera. Exactitude and ephemerality: extremes meet. The closer ones gets to the traumatic real, it seems, the more strongly it will fracture and disperse over different planes of representation. Thieme enters the gap between them, widening it, while simultaneously pulling the fragments of reality together into one unsettling force-field. Time and space are the very stuff that the writing of history – and reporting of events – whips into coherent shape. What if this was but a poor construct, and life’s changes left time knotted and space dented in peculiar ways? Then the search for lost time and deep listening to the reverberation of tangled spaces would pose a key challenge to historically critical thought: How to recalibrate the senses and learn from modes of heightened attentiveness to perceive the tangled temporalities and spatialities of transformative processes? Jan Verwoert