The Spatial Life of Saved Time
Valentina Di Chiara is an Italian architect, artist and researcher based in Paris since 2019.
She trained in architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan and the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais and also has a background in documentary cinema. She has collaborated with several architectural offices and cultural institutions in Paris and New York.
Her practice explores the relationship between inner experience and the worlds we inhabit. Working across spatial installations, moving image, architecture and publishing, she develops practice-based research investigating how spaces are imagined, represented and experienced, bringing together architectural thinking, visual culture and narrative practices.
She currently teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles and regularly leads workshops and serves on juries at design schools across Europe.
In 2019, she was awarded a research grant from the École d'Architecture de la Ville & des Territoires Paris-Est. Between 2019 and 2021, she collaborated with Éditions Cosa Mentale–Caryatide on the publication of several books on art and architecture.
In 2024–2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, supported by the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where her work was presented through solo and group exhibitions.
A Saturday morning in Paris, while sitting at my regular café, I called a close friend in Italy. She told me about her father, who had retired after more than thirty years of public service. Since then, he had gradually stopped communicating and rarely left the house.
This story crystallized broader questions I had already been exploring through my practice: what happens when the structures that organize our time suddenly disappear? What stayed with me was the unsettling experience of having time available, but not knowing where it goes - or where we go with it.
Retirement is one of the clearest examples of this transition, but it is only one manifestation of a wider condition. Across different situations - unemployment, care, voluntary career changes, artistic practice or technological change - people encounter moments when established temporal structures shift and their relationship with time has to be renegotiated.
Drawing on sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa's reflections on social acceleration, this project investigates the paradox behind these transformations. Contemporary technologies constantly promise to save us time. Automation, artificial intelligence and digital tools are presented as ways of freeing us from repetitive tasks and increasing efficiency. Yet the time that is supposedly gained often dissolves into new expectations, or into the anxiety of not knowing how to inhabit it.
Conceived as an experimental inquiry, my proposal combines speculative thinking with spatial exploration, asking: once time is liberated from productivity, which spaces allow it to unfold differently? Are there already places where this happens, or do we need to imagine entirely new ones?
This leads to another question: if we speak about saved time, can we also imagine spaces saved from productivity? What might they look like, and how could they be inhabited? How might architecture contribute to creating more meaningful ways of inhabiting saved time?