Sometimes I know right from the start that I won't make anything in time.
Time pushes me forward half a year in advance.
After another half a year, it pushes me even further.
In the beginning, there's a wall.
There's a hole in the wall and I can see the end through it.
The wall moves, we travel together.
Dana Tomečková - The need for slowness
The wall is white but I have a feeling that between the colored wall and the fallen dust...
...well, there's some communication going on, tied to the gravity.
With what naturally pulls it towards the ground, levitates.
I guess I sense only what I do, that's what I like about this job the most.
That this is the only thing I do, this one thing.
That there's not a whole lot of space for other thoughts.
That I like watching how it develops... the color.
I feel like there's not a lot more going on... neither the space nor the wanting nor the time.
It's like when you catch your tempo, a lot of things get answered.
I feel close to the contemplative level of things, not sure if in my creative process but more in life.
Not sure if we, or I have the time for it but the answer to the question is that
I will find the time for things depending on what I want to do and it's only for that.
After that, it's about only being with the thing you do.
That you fulfill the thing by simply spending time on it.
Just like everything you do with some belief or passion, or when you just want to immerse yourself in it.
It's nothing less and nothing more than that I guess.
That you create time to do this particular thing.
I always remember how my father used to say that I have no concept of time but
I think that each one of us has an individual tempo, especially in this age that requires
for the tempo to be quick and effective and allows us to handle many things at once.
I think it's important to know my own tempo.
Who am I and how much time do I need.
I feel that naturally flows into things we do, or things I do.
When I come here I tell myself, God I love this.
It charges me up, that's what it gives to me.
I keep working with the motif that keeps repeating itself - volatility, temporality.
I enjoy doing things with my hands lately.
To not create forms that divide me from the thing I'm working on.
And I thought I won't say anything...
At the start of the last year, I started focusing on a theme I call Dočasná hmota (Temporary matter).
It was a series of mostly objects made of materials like ash, sugar, plaster.
It also included a series of drawings and a video interview with my friend and co-pilgrim Simona Gottierova.
You know, we know how to perceive things through the light that falls and reflects into our eyes.
I can see that there isn't nothing, there is something.
Something exists there in the dark.
But you have a good eye for that.
To see something where people don't see anything.
This is my favorite view, it's enough for me to come here and see this, I tell myself okay, I'm done working for today.
In SNGG Studio, we had an open atelier where the series was presented as a space-like situation
with local sounds, matter, local explosions, and expansion.
A part of this work is a notebook with texts of Temporary matter.
I can't see what is changing.
Because of the shortness of time that can last a lifetime, I won't notice anything.
As small and as long it is, it's unnoticable.
I guess I like poetic language that offers various options for naming things.
That you don't name them like this but...
...like this.
I was looking at drawings from when I was a child.
I really liked how a child fills empty space in a drawing, there's always something.
It's just filled with doodles, I guess I do it as an adult, following what's in the space because there is always something.
First of all, it's a simple thing that can be made difficult to think about.
This is a very specific thing about her work.
A simple gesture opens new possibilities of thinking about something we already know well but we would never consider thinking about it.
Blue is the basic entity, it's air and water.
Blue is a space that you can swim into, it's like you're in water.
White is also present but she's home here, I don't want to cover it up entirely.
I will go only as far as I am able to, tiptoeing without bringing a ladder or a chair to reach higher.
The work at Beastro lead to cooperation with Maja Štefančíková and our performative situation called Živý Gradient (Live Gradient).
We worked with a pigment and a move into a public space, into connecting the interior with the exterior.
It was mostly done via a soundtrack, a cyclic singing of the performers that rotated in and out of the space.
It worked with the sound that comes out of the energy of the city.
A long "Oooh" sound... why was it "Oooh"?
The sound came out of the traffic and what is the sound of the buzzing of the city that
you mostly ignore but you can feel it inside you.
It says 1931 and she was born in 1909 I guess.
So she was probably 22 or 23 years old.
This is my great-grandma, Jana.
I like this photo because it reminds me that she was probably a pretty cool person.
It gives me the courage to get into things.
Something like... the stance is very confident, like I dare you.
I was baking gingerbread with my granny for eight hours.
It was a time spent squeezing, rolling, placing the dough, and waiting for the smell.
And then all over again a few more times.
It was windy outside and my granny's home at the top of the hill was resisting the strong winds.
The gingerbread cutouts in the shape of a heart slowly grew in the oven and then stopped.
Then granny said "We're gonna finish soon" but she didn't mean the gingerbread, she meant the end of the world.
Judging from what we're doing to the planet, I think it's close by.
How the temperature is rising, did you see the large fires in Australia?
I'll add, we're making it come faster.
I studied mass media communication for five years.
It was a great time but it was also a time for self-searching.
While working, I asked myself when do I plan to do these things?
I startled myself.
It was a clear decision to go to another University and
maybe it doesn't make sense on the outside, why am I going to do something different...
But it also felt like I gained some sense of urgency and some self-esteem over the course of time.
At university, I was indecisive if I should stay and study jewelry but I also experienced a semester on intermedia,
another semester on photography and I during the last study year I went to Oslo for the entire year.
What was funny is that the university had amazing equipment, even metalworking tools, and what did I do?
I blew air into a plastic bag that you can walk into.
The installation took place in an empty apartment.
Some people said they felt like they were inside of a whale, in mom's womb, in an organic cloud-like opening.
What if we don't do the same thing or return to it, or search for the same thing that manifests itself in different forms.
When I started doing jewelry after studying it for six years,
I remember a lot of "ritual dances" before I even began working on something.
I had immense respect for it because I knew that if I make something, it will stay that way forever.
It paralyzed me, I guess that's what got me started with working on things that
don't hold shape and what comes from the naturality of the material.
But I also think that I'm searching for some middle ground -
strong, firm, concrete, unchangeable, while the other part is different.
Even with jewelry, I'm trying to find a level that goes ... like this, enough.
I eventually moved from jewelry to less constrictive things like objects and installations.
At the same time, the character of these works changed into drafts of some situations.
The first thing was probably a bachelor's thesis called Circuit.
There were small models of cycles and how we get into cycles and search for our center.
It was also about time, slowing downtime, or time colliding with an obstacle.
This is a project that comes out of a very tight personal relationship of the three of us -
myself, Simona Gottierová, and Martina Mäsiarová in the Medium gallery.
We were present there on and off for a month and basically lived in the gallery.
Various situations came out of it, they were on edge of banality and
something that makes an interaction with an audience.
There were interviews with the audience, reading, cooking of a soup,
food that you cool in the window, washing the floor, laying, breathing, hugging.
We tried to be open and with that comes a lot of insecurity or embarrassment.
It was a challenge for us to deal with these things on the move.
It happened in a performance that didn't have a specific duration.
It wasn't from 6 o'clock until 7 o'clock but it was happening all day.
This collaboration continued further at the Kiosk festival.
There was a certain presence in the absence going on.
It was an empty family house and we brought subtle changes that served as proof of someone's presence.
It was like something is happening here, someone lives here, or did they just leave?
Hot tea is brewing here, here's rising dough under a cloth and leaks onto the wooden floor,
here are freshly cut apples, a pie is baking here, here's foam in the bathtub.
The nice thing is that the things are still there and it doesn't matter to it what we think about them.
How we try to anchor them, touch them, connect them...
Of course, it's a banal thing but that's the power of banality.
It still carries that charge.
You won't notice it because it doesn't attracr you like an apple on a tree but then
the apple connects with something, a larger principle that comes out of it into the air and further.
I'm finishing the third mold for the apple.
It's a double apple that we found in the garden.
When I saw it and touched it, it reminded me of an object in space that created itself
by a collision of two objects that were so slow they didn't destroy themselves but grew together.
Their speed was calculated to be slow enough and it was approximately the speed of a human walk.
I found it fascinating that something you grow in the garden has a connection with something of different sizes and in a different realm.
I'm attracted by these connections of something simple and something that surpasses us both in size and depth.
Which is something that we might not entirely understand.
So I watched the evolution of that apple.
How it gets smaller and how it changes into something entirely different.
During my studies in Oslo, I met Ata who is a cosmologist and my ex-roommate.
And we found out that we have an interest in similar things but each of us sees them through our own medium.
Ata through cosmology, me through something a lot more intuitive.
I asked him very simple questions, like a child who has no clue about space would.
This stayed and we still communicate today.
He helps me to move forward.
I always felt lost at exact sciences back in primary and secondary school.
I never understood physics and maths.
It's like I am free of the knowledge of exact sciences.
But something fascinates me about how we perceive space, how we perceive fullness even in a space that is empty.
I made a cube out of loose plaster into a form that looked firm but if you touched it it would crumble in your hands.
I like things that are physical in a way.
That's why I like modern dance and why I study the body as a living matter,
through myself, or I search for levels for my stuff and bring them into a more performative level.
I never noticed that sphere over there, one side of it drops from two hemispheres, and from the other side drops into a hemisphere.
It's a model for a sphere in Žilina, for a synagogue.
I always find interesting the moment, the miracle in a banality that can happen.
It lasts only for a short while but it changes everything around it.
When you want to perceive something, you need a different time for the stuff.
Maybe be more present in the moment and in general, things that last a short while but their intensity is too strong to be negligible.
Maybe the duration as an experience, something that has a volatile quality to it, or something that exists in material but only for a certain time.
That's why I worked with more loose materials.
It's a quality of matter, but we are matter too.
It doesn't have to have the shape of a body for it to be a body.
I think it speaks a lot about the body.
Temporality, softness, fragility, volatility.
The relationship, closeness, interaction, touch, what type of touch, how you should act in a soft way to get close to it.
What does it say to you, how are you breathing...
Why do I do what I do?
It's also about my search for how to be in things in the strongest and most awake way.
How to realize the borders of our own time, the Earth's time.
When it comes to questions like our finality and death, we struggle with things like fear from the end, the border.
That's why there's the need to not hurry.