Timelines is one of the first series of works Nicolas Manenti created: working as a night-guard, he began fighting boredom by using the material he found on the workplace, including date-stamps which he used to parody conceptual artists of the 1960´s such as On Kawara or Roman Opalka, in a «bureaucratic» reenactment: unlike On Kawara´s works, the dates do not reflect the artist´s lifetime, but the validity of the stamp he uses, which is often limited to 12 years. 

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Over the years, Manenti collected different models of stamps, some dating back to the 1930s, and some special formats, like the one used in Betriebsferien.