I watched my father-in-law escort our child out of TAXISPALAIS in Innsbruck right around the beginning of my talk last Thursday. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. My father-in-law had driven from South Tyrol to Innsbruck so he could take care of our child while I delivered a lecture and participated in a beautiful seminar called ‘Stories of Time’, part of a series of events held alongside an ongoing exhibition about migration. I’d originally travelled to review the exhibition, but while I was there, I got to talking to the director, whom I knew from when I was a resident at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck. I’d then shared with her my recently published essay, Milking Time, which she totally connected with. She then invited me to present alongside the anthropologist and philosopher Elizabeth A. Povinelli.

It felt like a moment of arrival for me. Because when I had moved to Tramin in June 2020, I was desperate for work that could also nurture my intellectual pursuits. I had reached out to many people and someone who was in the final stages of publishing a reader asked if I might proofread it. At the time it was my highest paying gig, and the most satisfying, because I was dealing directly with contemporary theory that encompassed various notions of time and interspecies relations and examined a vast slew of concepts from artificial intelligence to trans rights to bees. Elizabeth A Povinelli was one of the contributors to this reader that was published under the title ‘More-Than-Human’. Her essay spoke about her anthropological work. I was quite floored by it and I remember making extensive notes. To find myself suddenly invited to read alongside her and to participate in conversation with her about notions of time felt like a privilege.