What size is it? Does it fit in your palm? In your arms? On your lap? Is it bigger than you? Is it light enough for you to carry?
What color is it? Does it have any?
Try to describe what happens when you stroke it with your hand.
Try to describe what happens when you push a finger into it.
What is its temperature? Does it have a body temperature, or is it cold, or warm? Or you do not perceive its temperature?
Does it smell? If so, describe the smell to me… Does it produce any sound? Try to describe or imitate it…
Where is it in relation to you? Is it close, is it far away? Where or from which side do you see it? How do you react to each other? Do you touch each other? Can you?
I focused on creating situations in which recycling, performance and imprinting become methods of making experiences and emotions or their parts visible. The thematic link between these situations are the partial branches of motherhood, needs and care, but also the invisible imprints of relational patterns into the material and back into the mother’s body.
The Thing is a record on the verge of guided meditation, therapeutic session, and conversation. It deconstructs the conversation as a format, using its various forms to reveal what message and about what we are passing on.
I strived to connect viewers with the experience they are witnessing. They enter it by reading the situation as a document and by inserting their own bodies into some part of it. The individual stages of this tracking wind from somewhere to elsewhere and are subsequently reused for something else. Recycling is a method. But the boundaries between beginnings and ends are not immune – they respond to the original claim of visibility by evading it.
The Material becomes the guide in the process. It bears traces. What should happen to it to make it give a testimony? Can it be the main character? This collective thing is invisible.
My diploma work evolved around the material evidence of mother care and its adequacy. It raised questions of manipulation, its consequences and side-effects, its traces and its unintentional transfer to the baby body and, simultaneously, to the Material (clothes). It shows mother as the isolated guarantor of sanity who faces the risk of vanishing. I let the collected children clothes recycled and shared the cotton paper (Material) with the mothers who were the concerned caring persons. They were invited to go through eight simple exercises that were referring to the manipulation with the child, its body and the clothes. Based on this repeated experience I wanted to draw attention to the fragility of the caring attention each of us need to balance in order to preserve life and health of the ones committed to care. The final design of the diploma exhibition confronted the visitors with the particular manipulative box situations (named ecocatively attractor, inducer, inhibitor, catcher, incubator, simulator). The missing instructions intended to evoke instincts through the touch of the unknown, to restore the perceptive consideration of the other and, ideally, compile both the reasonable and sensible know-how recognizing ourselves in the needs of others. The mother dilemma is present.
exhibition of the graduates Muses and Monsters, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, 2021
