From 1 to 5 November 2021, Tselinny Center for Contemporary Culture was accepting applications for the 12 Seconds project. We provided 54 participants with film cameras, with 27 frames each at a 1/120 second shutter speed. The guest curator of the project is Alexander Ugai, a photographer and video artist, who reveals the themes of memory and nostalgia in his works, as well as the interaction of history with today's reality and with the future. On 12 November 2021, "In daily practice, the present, usually appears as a state somewhere in between of ‘too early & too late’ and we have no enough time to find out the meaning and finality. The project idea is to create conditions and practices that allow us to experience not the quantity of time but the quality of time. The access is provided through an image, characterised by its development, and which is not created by human hands. The development here is not an ability to see the unseen, but rather a potential retro-causality that allows the effect to influence the cause. A ‘not created by human hands’ image suggests that there is a direct or optical and an inverse or temporal relationship between the photographic image (index) and its subject (referent). The method contemplates that the film development coincides with the point of retro activation, in other words, all images, initially, will ‘move’ in the opposite direction - from the future to the past. 

The process of reverse photography can be a particular experience of the present as a continuity between the uniqueness of the moment and the non-linearity of time." "12 Seconds is a portrait of our era, characterising the time, the people and the images of the city that will be sent into the future. Over three decades, the photographs of random people will acquire new meanings and be filled with as-yet-unknown interpretations that will help new generations better understand our reality." On 12 November 2021, the reconstruction site of the Tselinny cinema became a venue for a symbolic laying of a time capsule, where every participant can put his or her camera with the captured photos into the capsule. We hope to open our time capsule in 30 years in 2051.