Adéla Součková
She introduces us to the primary philosophical wonder: why is there something rather than nothing?
Sun.
Bird.
Fish.
Cursor.
Fountain.
Root and cable.
Rooting fountain.
The spring, where the old men sit.
Eye and a positioning symbol on the map.
Profile. Profile in the landscape, profile on the Internet.
Touchscreen in animal hands whose thumbs do not stand in opposition to other fingers.
Digital Venus, who strangles all of our ancestors in her womb, the all-seeing cunt.
Localization cross. Here we are. We are here, we are here and now.
In Berlin. In Prague.
Adéla Součková creates a vocabulary of images and concepts, which she uses in her practice, in drawings on old hospital sheets, in installations, in performances. Her vocabulary is eclectic, she picks elements across different registers of knowledge. Her practice is one of eidetic thinking. It connects through relationships similarities, as Renaissance alchemists did, as an Internet image search engine does. The practice of constant repetition of drawing lets relations emerge. None of her motifs has a fixed meaning, with each iteration their signification is developed in new ways, in each new configuration with the other images.
Adéla is an artist of the Anthropocene, or perhaps it might be more accurate to mention Chthulucene, as proposed by Donna Haraway. Not an age of continuing human domination, but an age in which we are all connected across species boundaries. It is a necessity to practice interspecies communication and reciprocity, as Donna Haraway writes (Staying With the Trouble, 2016) as it is the only way to remain on the planet “living and dying together well.”
The drawings speak of distances and empty space between beings. In their uncertain charcoal lines they open up other relationships than overcoming distance by colonizing power and speed. They explore how to develop relationships across this rift with touch or caress. Adéla’s relationship to the world is all but naively innocent, realizing the inevitability with which critters murder and devour each other. We all have to acknowledge our biological determinedness. We are offered an opportunity to develop relations with the world, which are other than grasping through eyesight and intellect. Touching, caressing, groping, smelling and tasting the world, things and creatures in it. We are offered intuition as a counterweight to desiccating light of reason, offering us ways to touch the world without violence, without attempting to possess or exploit. It is in hands that Adéla displays almost obsessive interest – in human hands and in the hands of our animal kin.
From more traditional painting techniques Adéla’s emphasis shifted to performative qualities of her work. Her installations include an almost ritualistic component of drawings in situ. Adéla dances, draws with her whole body in the sacred white cube gallery space of our “always-already-contemporary” art and considers options to move beyond the totality of this present.
When using old hospital linen for her work, she talks of therapy with a conscious reference to Joseph Beuys. However, a healing process is not meant to be a return to a lost state of health, as believed by modern medical science. It’s a much more complex process, holistic and progressive. It should aims at harmonizing the relationships of the individual to the community and its environment, the ecosystem of the planet. We can not naively try to return to some kind of paradise lost, which in fact never existed. We can only try to gaze with unflinching eye to the future (however gloomy it seems) to come up again and again with the will to organize our relationships with all critters on the planet into such a shape, as to allow us all to continue story or the terran life. The repeated drawings of Adéla Součková in their multiple configurations tell mythical stories to offer us a formula for this troubled coexistence.
Radim Labuda
- –Heeey! –Hi Adela!00:00:34.800
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- What the heck are you doing here?00:00:38.200
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- When you gouge it out... Wow...00:00:46.300
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- And it feels so... to touch...00:00:49.300
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- Nature is erotic.00:00:56.150
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- I remember this childhood experience when I was in school for the first time00:01:02.200
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- and there were some words on the chalkboard and I couldn't understand00:01:07.200
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- that those four letters represent, say, an owl.00:01:12.500
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- I just couldn't grasp the connection. It was just impossible.00:01:17.100
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- And then it took me a long time to accept that the Earth has gravity.00:01:23.050
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- That people just don't fly off.00:01:29.050
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- This look-out point is very good because I wanted you to shoot my profile in a landscape.00:01:32.400
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- You know those early Renaissance landscapes where the perspective doesn't go to a vanishing point,00:01:42.050
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- but rather it rises up and it still has some of the Gothic style.00:01:48.400
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- There is something religious about those paintings.00:01:52.450
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- The portraits of aristocrats from that period00:01:56.200
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- are often depicted in profile with a landscape presented in the background.00:01:59.200
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- They meant it in a different way than I interpret it now00:02:03.350
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- but what I like about it is...00:02:07.200
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- that the head is looking forward,00:02:12.250
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- not at the spectator00:02:15.300
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- and it creates something of an ornament with its background.00:02:19.100
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- It's one of those things that I'm interested in all along00:02:24.100
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- to subvert the usual relationship between the figure and the background00:02:27.300
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- and put both on par in a sort of endless ornament00:02:31.250
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- because that is how I understand reality, or how it is for me.00:02:35.150
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- We are – and everything else, for that matter – we are all sparks of one big fire.00:02:44.300
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- So I thought it could be nice to do it here.00:02:52.050
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- I am simply fascinated by this simple and banal thing that we are sitting here in some spot00:06:05.100
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- but at the same time we can view this spot on the map and what is the difference between these two experiences.00:06:12.000
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- the map represents a place and it is its simplification at the same time00:06:18.000
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- which is a description aid for easier orientation in the world00:06:23.000
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- and at the same time through the orientation it allows the reality to be instrumentalised00:06:27.200
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- without feeling bad about it. This is interesting for me.00:06:34.800
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- You can then travel around with your finger then you can plot wars,00:06:39.600
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- You can spin the globe around as you wish.00:06:43.100
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- It can easily be a very irresponsible thing to have this physical distance from reality.00:06:48.700
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- You lose a sense of responsibility.00:06:54.600
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- If you have a word instead of an animal and a map instead of a landscape00:06:58.100
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- and make several other removing steps of this kind00:07:04.100
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- then you have enough distance to act upon reality00:07:08.300
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- in purely rational and instrumental manner.00:07:12.400
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- This is one of my central preoccupations.00:07:16.800
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- This is a golden cage.00:07:27.500
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- Its bars are made of cartographic boundaries.00:07:31.150
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- This is a cosmic lady, an endlessly uploading cosmic lady.00:07:48.100
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- There is a snake here, frogs, an endless upload,00:07:53.100
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- a hand dissecting a clock face or perhaps a planet,00:07:57.150
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- a positioning hand over there,00:08:02.900
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- hands playing with a planetary egg.00:08:06.000
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- The next one has faded a lot.00:08:15.100
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- Here is the pixelated Venus.00:08:17.100
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- It originally began because I didn't have financial means00:08:21.500
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- and these hospital linens were available in large quantities.00:08:25.500
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- Then I got fascinated with their hospital origins.00:08:29.200
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- I began thinking of this work as therapeutic.00:08:33.200
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- There is the aspect of healing as these are hospital beddings.00:08:36.900
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- Now I don't know, I'll see where it leads me next.00:08:41.700
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- Hell, some bastard spilled some wine on this one!00:08:47.700
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- Over there.00:08:51.800
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- I'm planning to make a video00:08:53.500
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- where this situation would be acted out,00:08:56.050
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- not as a drawing but as a real life situation.00:09:01.200
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- This one looks nice.00:09:34.050
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- Poor fishes...00:09:37.050
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- Look at this one, look at those jaws!00:09:39.800
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- –Enough? –Yes, thank you.00:09:51.500
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- –I can help you carry it. –Thanks, ok.00:09:59.000
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- I once read Golem, a book by Gustav Meyrink00:10:22.600
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- and there is this metaphor of a tub with ice-cold water and trouts swimming in it.00:10:26.200
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- His hands are freezing as he's trying to catch the fish,00:10:32.700
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- but they always slip away never to be caught.00:10:37.900
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- He likens the fish to his thoughts, which he's trying to halt, to grasp, to murder.00:10:41.700
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- So this image stuck in my mind since childhood years00:10:49.600
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- and I have worked with it several times already.00:10:53.800
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- Fish is a powerful symbol for me, which I don't quite understand00:10:57.050
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- There is this image in Kabbalah mysticism00:11:01.500
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- of a human hand with a fish in the palm00:11:05.100
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- It's used in biblical symbolism, in ancient Greek one...00:11:09.000
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- It strikes me.00:11:14.500
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- They are mute... and they have certain proximity to death.00:11:18.100
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- You can see them being murdered in public space.00:11:23.200
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- That is also important, that act of killing.00:11:29.700
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- I hope this is the better version... probably is.00:12:54.950
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- This one was only in Rome, if it's the one I think it is.00:13:02.200
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- It hasn't been exhibited anywhere else.00:13:08.700
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- In what way are antlers and roots related?00:13:42.500
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- They must be related in some way because their shape is similar.00:13:48.400
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- It's a sort of archaic or magical thinking.00:13:52.800
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- Through this analogy of shape itself a meaning is generated... or arises.00:13:59.000
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- Just like the name of the plant liverwort got its name, because some part of it00:14:05.050
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- I can't remember which, root or leaves, – resembles human liver.00:14:10.050
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- This type of thinking can never be fully consequential.00:14:15.300
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- I truly think and insist that imagination is what makes us00:14:21.250
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- autonomous, independent, and free in fact.00:14:26.950
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- It is purely ours and it's a very political issue.00:14:31.700
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- What we really urgently need is independent and non-individualistic thinking.00:14:36.900
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- You know there are topics there that relate to the Anthropocene, it's clear.00:15:01.200
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- I didn't call it that way, others did.00:15:08.000
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- I'm interested in what does it do to my mind00:15:13.100
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- to use all these smart devices and Facebook and such.00:15:19.050
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- What does it do to my mind when I can view the planet on video from outside00:15:24.200
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- ...from the space.00:15:31.600
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- Well, you can look into the Sun through your eyelashes00:16:35.800
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- if you squint in a particular manner.00:16:38.700
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- This motif of staring into the Sun which glares at you and blinds you00:16:44.000
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- resembles intellect, which you guzzle up, until the rationality dries you up and makes you blind00:16:50.500
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- because you can grasp and understand so much.00:16:57.700
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- Body and touch, the hapticity is very important to me.00:17:05.700
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- It is crucial to feel, to touch, to experience in the body00:17:15.200
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- and just put more emphasis on this experience, because I think we are all stuck in the head too much.00:17:19.700
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- That is why I like these motifs.00:17:26.850
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- I'm interested to see if these motifs may still have validity00:17:29.700
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- – and these may be old Renaissance symbols for example –00:17:33.800
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- and some sort of effect on people.00:17:37.200
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- If so, in what way may they be updated to bring back their immediate effect?00:17:41.500
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- As symbols which people don't have to think about in their head00:17:47.400
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- but that should have some direct effect instead.00:17:52.900