I count only sunny hours

I COUNT ONLY SUNNY HOURS

“I Count Only Sunny Hours” navigates through archival materials, interviews, and moving images to trace fragmentation of time and pleasure. Using different concepts of time ( part-time, flexible time, mental time, and deep time ) “I Count Only Sunny Hours” explores the displacement of leisure by the logic of productivity and anxieties of precarious employment. It follows multiple histories: marble quarrying, geology, U.S. public institutions, spread of literacy, and flexible work.

In its current form as a two channel video, a historian describes a patch of herbs from quarry workers’ settlements, a geologist explains the formation of mountains and microscopic foraminifera, and giant machines cut building size blocks from the depths of a mountain. “I Count Only Sunny Hours” parses minerals, memories, sites, and bodies to zero in on the moments of pure leisure, and dives deep into the meaning of work and time.

Research materials

Photograph / Dorset Historical Society archive

Dimensional map by Art Guilbert / Dorset Historical Society

Postcard / Dorset Historical Society archive

U.S. buildings built with Vermont marble / Dorset Historical Society

Production stills

Works