Or wait... I'm not sure if it's this way or that way...
Let's try this way.
We'll definitely get to the psychiatry this way...
I got to Hysteria thanks to a water spring.
First I was interested in watermill hydropower at the Schaubmar Mill that has been diverted.
When I started studying the water spring and where it originally came from
I went to a museum and talked to this lady who told me that the water from the spring has been used in a spa.
Back in the day, women's diseases and sicknesses were treated there.
One of them was Hysteria.
That got me interested so I started focusing on it.
The light is different now, as I'm looking at it.
Patterns are forming on the tiles.
Hysteria as a word comes from the old Greek and it means "underbelly" or "uterus",
so it was decided in advance that it will be a woman's disease.
Hippocrates characterized the disease and said that the uterus will move from its original place and
start to travel in the woman's body and as it enters the higher parts of the body it causes hysterical expressions.
One treatment that was meant to restore the uterus to its original place
was to return it to its original function, so to give birth.
In the 19th-century Hysteria blooms and one of the manifestations when it disappeared was when women started to emancipate themselves.
They left their homes and started doing what they were interested in.
One similar topic that follows hysteria was witches.
Witches were women who fulfilled their needs the most.
The term Hysteria is currently being used as a derrogatory term for emotional behavior.
It's mostly used on women but medicine doesn't recognize the term anymore.
I noticed examples when media used it to refer to women behavior, especially black women behavior...
The behavior of black women is stereotypically described as wild so they're often labeled with the term Hysteria.
I often found the term connected to Serena Williams who is very energetic on the tennis court, she expresses her emotions.
Her behavior is labeled as hysteric, but when male tennis players act like that it's labeled as powerful or as showing their opinions.
Even more interesting example is Kamala Harris when she pragmatically asked a member of Trump's government questions in court of law.
She wasn't being emotional at all, she never raised her voice, she was just continuously asking questions.
She could be described as tough.
Media was all over it and a CNN presenter labeled her as hysterical.
It seemed to me like he tried to devalue her words by saying that it's hysterical.
Labeling someone as hysterical because they ask questions is absurd.
We can consider them proto feminists.
What I find entertaining is that in the 19th century there were figurants who performed the Hysteria in front of an audience.
The purpose of the figurant was to perform hysterical fits.
The movement they created was spasmodic...very rigid and rough movements...
... so this eventually evolved into contemporary dances.
That's an interesting connection I found within Hysteria.
That the first modernist dancers often worked with this, the expressionist dancing works with this, the spasmodic movement that can be seen in hysterical fits.
This is where the first women's psychiatry was, in this building.
Shall we go take a look inside?
I'm gonna put the backpack down here somewhere.
I've been considering this place.
The sun shines naturally into this dark place, so I was thinking that the events that will take place here could be lit naturally like this.
I find it interesting that as I was focusing on Hysteria and what it means, I found this place and I thought that it was already finished.
That this is the mind of hysteria, that this is it but I need to revive the place in some way.
It's basically a shadowplay.
Someone tidied up over here.
Someone completely cleaned it up, it wasn't me though.
Someone just came over here and cleaned up the parquet.
There's newly available space in the former school gym at Nová Cvernovka in Bratislava.
We go practice there.
Before that I solved the space issue randomly, I searched for halls in various galleries and that's where we practiced.
My process is that I usually try things on my own, I record what I do at home.
When I come to the practice, I give precise instructions to the performers.
You'll go sideways... because this is where you start... and this is where you go sideways.
This is where you don't spin...
You will pull at the end there...
...that's where the girls will spin...
...yeah, let's go sideways...
...It looks like we got it.
I started giving assignments for the first time, I don't make the choreography on my own.
They get short assignments and they get to work with their predisposition and with their body.
So, the movement is loose, not stylized and it comes out of what they were given.
Their assignment was that they should think about how they move at a dance club the most often.
So it was pretty random...
...spinning the whole body...
I asked the performers to start doing the movement they picked in slow motion.
The entire performative situation speaks about the economy of attention in the relationship between audience and performers,
and how this relationship influences the two parties, while the audience is the starting point that puts the performers into a different reality.
As soon as the attention of the audience starts to fade, the efficiency of the performers start to fade too.
I noticed a dust ball on the ground at the Slovak National Gallery, and that got me both interested and shocked.
I took it, I think I still have it at home.
I found it interesting how is it possible that I found a dust ball in this completely clean, sterile space.
So I invented this intelligent vacuum cleaner, a performance of the machine. It was divided into three actions.
The first action was that the performers got on their knees and swiped the dirt on the ground at the gallery.
Their hair changed into vacuum cleaner bristles.
The second action was after they cleaned up, there was a plinth made of paper, basically a really thick sketchbook in the middle of the space.
They started to shake off the dirt gathered in their hair. The hair became a brush, painting on the paper.
The third action was when they revealed their faces, tied their hair into a bun, and contextualized the artwork with a label like in a gallery.
I was fascinated by the gallery space that's always clean, preserved, there's never any dirt, it's like a separate world divided from the real world.
The entire act interacted with the audience, during the first act the gallery was full of people.
When they got on all fours and started wiping, they also wiped away the audience and the audience backed away.
Basically, there was a vortex of the audience, it was interesting.
As soon as a person got in the way of the vacuum cleaner, the machine started growling, stopped working,
and waited until the person realizes that the machine got stuck and can't work until they move away.
I process the theme first but I also think about the audience, I can work with the audience and make them participate in the art.
I make sure to create open situations, and as they happen the audience can step in, I count on them as an element that can gently influence the act.
I experimented a lot with this at the beginning and I saw some almost violent situations.
So I learned my lesson that it's better to give them the chance to leave if they want to and let them be free.
I created a moving acoustic sculpture. It always began at the House of Arts and traveled across two or three squares in Brno.
A group of performers stopped by, made sounds and performed sculpting with tools.
When Cafe Utopia invited me we scouted locations and talked about sculptures that disappeared, got moved, or were unfinished in public spaces.
So I got inspired by the moment of invisibility when the sculpture is gone, the disappearance, or erasing of the sculpture from the history of a space.
That was the first level. The second level was that the performance had a precise sound component.
The sculpting took five minutes and it was composed of rhythmical and melodic components.
The second part included audience interaction.
The audience had the option to prolong the performance whenever they started taking pictures or recording.
The performers froze and created a statue out of themselves while performing directly for the participant's phone screen.
They stayed frozen for as long as the audience member held their phone up and recorded them. Then they continued with sculpting.
The end of the act, probably the last minute or so also included voices.
The audience couldn't participate anymore and the members formed into sculptures, and then they moved into another location.
It took around two hours to get through two or three squares.
A fly!
Dana Tomečková introduced me to the Beastro space.
She had an exhibition there and painted the entire gallery with chalk.
It created this hatching, it was clear how the drawing is being made, the strokes were easy to read and it was like a simple wall painting.
I saw the connection between the hatching of the drawing and cars that move around and create a sound like that of a hatching.
So the act was to sound the interior drawing with the exterior drawing and create a loop between Zochova and the gallery space.
I plastically placed the performers, so on one hand they fit into the space but on the other hand, they protruded.
Any pedestrian would see the performer standing on a car and stopped by to find out what is happening.
I spend a lot of time on that street trying to find a moment of quiet but the street is busy all the time.
The act consisted of a reaction but also the tuning of the sound that comes from the outside and it might be unpleasant, noisy and inside of the gallery it changes into a clean tone.
When I kept coming here to listen to it, it's not exactly a pleasant noise but you can tune into it and...
...start perceiving that it has some sort of quality.
When I come somewhere I listen to what the space has to offer.
I have a lot of videos where I just arrive somewhere and start clapping.
To find out what the place can offer...
This looks like there used to be some...
...some cattle stables.
This is the place I like.
This one.
But there's no light.
I have a feeling as if it was a cinema screen.