10. 6. – 26. 7. 2024
Open Studio: 16. 7. 2024
Residency outcome: 25. 7. 2024
Curator and author of the text: Tea Záchová
How do you work together and since when? What common process do you apply in your work together?
After having known each other for many years, this project is the first that we have worked on in person as a duo, and there have been some challenges along the way that traverse, character, working styles, and cultural norms. Since we are close friends and somehow share an understanding of intimate research styles, that is really getting to know your subject, some of the overlapping between sonic and ecological knowledge, though tacit, have been sometimes difficult to communicate to each other in a way that binds our professional worlds and our intimate one we share as close friends. In terms of our common processes, we think that a shared dedication to wanting to know in new ways, both politically and relationally, has been the driving force to this project.
Do you make things together or do you have a certain strategy that one of you works on the script and the other on the visualization, or how do you divide the work?
We don’t really divide the work in this way, although we come from different fields, we both have quirks and kinks in our own fields anyway. Demi privileges active listening and walking, insisting that it is easy to shock but what is challenging is to make people feel cared for even in challenging spaces. She also aims to encourage critical reflection of future histories, which can be quite a visceral experience. Whereas Sabrina deals more with performative body work, looking at bodily intra-agenting, and we believe that these are often concerned with the radical now in the moment of the performance or exhibition, but circumvent issues of longevity and life cycles. So, though we both care about creating laboratories of slow and, at times, long intra-agential relations, their aesthetics and temporalities of them are quite different.
How do you think your viewer is able to immerse themselves in the listening process during the exhibition? Most of the time, viewers are used to discovering and consuming art through one sense, and that is the eyes. Do you try to suppress this sense at the expense of others?
By touching and therefore connecting certain individuals of the alien invasive species, a sound sculpture is triggered. They consist of the plants specific Biodata-Sonification, meaning that the resistance from the plant is mechanically changed into midi waves and sent as ‘information’ to a synthesizer, merged with field recordings from the surrounding industrial wastelands where they stem from. Additionally, a live Biodata-Sonification process is running permanently, which allows us to listen to the rawer and more immediate dataflow of the specimen and how it might change with the atmosphere of the audience’s presence.
Can you explain more generally the concepts your work is associated with—like monoculture and pluriculture in plant life?
We would like to disassociate from these kinds of dichotomies, partially from Sabrina’s perspective, because we do not want to deal with any kinds of entrenched moral frameworks that come along with dichotomies: monoculture: bad, pluriculture: good. Especially since they are so tied to and dominated by extractive and top-down relationships between what we perceive to be human and non-human. From Demi’s perspective, there is not a necessary abandonment of these categories but just a wild and radical severance from the understanding of these language sets and practices as anything that can lend itself to a moral framework, meaning that we could use them as some kind of shared signifier to speak about a kind of empirical moment if we were to embrace a total alien understanding. But since it’s quite difficult to get away from the way that reinvention tends to continue to center on the initial problematic concepts, it’s not important to rescue them either, i.e., they do not exist within the same ontological framework that we are trying to formulate.
Where did the invasive local species come from and why is it appearing in this particular location, or locations around factories?
So, here in Pragovka, we find some of the most common invasive alien species of Central Europe, as expected. The sites where we met and harvested them from have heavily densified soil which contains loads of traces of toxins from the car factory and other industrial developments up to the scale of macro-trash of all sorts. In these troubled habitats, the highly adaptable and resilient Solidago gigantea, Erigeron annuus, and Ailanthus altissima are spreading and offering shade for fellow companion species which are following in their successional trace. In sloping areas or wherever moisture accumulates through other factors, we can find the powerful Reynoutria japonica and even Robinia pseudoacacia.
