When the Feminine Eel Invites Us on a Journey into Humanity’s Unconscious
Somewhere in the middle of the video trilogy Brood – Stranger’s Vial – Womb, a trio of performers gaze at their reflections in a gilded cosmetic mirror. Just a few minutes prior, it stood on the ground as part of a ready-made LARP field in which Raja, Helion, Fae, Zet, and Enfys move in a sonic, polyphonic choreography. The reflections in the glass surface are not only a means of self-examination for the gradually transforming actors (and their characters) but perhaps also refer to the refractive quality of Natália Sýkorová’s work itself. In the same way that heroism in post-humanist fiction occupies biologically ambiguous positions, Sýkorová fractures the unity of time and space, of voice and image, of narrative and performance in order to create fissures into which we can insert our own non-anthropocentric speculation.
What remains is a witch who embodies the climate crisis. The rest is shrouded in ambiguity. Brood – Stranger’s Vial – Womb may be a LARP and a performance directed through voice instructions, but instead of coherent worldbuilding, what we get is an ex post recording in video form. While in the beginning we observe Raja in her laboratory acting in accordance with the voiceover, later on it’s as if the events narrated by the voice unexpectedly fall in and out of sync with the footage of the performance. Sometimes the characters being described are not the ones currently on the screen, other times the voiceover narrates events that have not yet happened or, on the contrary, happened long ago.
Thus, rather than a clear fictional world, Sýkorová constructs a collective speculative space in which identities and subjects quaver—in line with the post-humanist perspective, according to which the sovereign existence of humans is a mere fiction that dissolves at the thought of all the other organisms that enable our existence. In Brood – Stranger’s Vial – Womb these are, for example, the bacteria that sing in a modulated and cacophonic manner, transforming the non-binary scientist Raja.
Just as nature is closed to us by its mystery, which is irreducible to the human mind, many elements of the video’s scenery escape our understanding or remain tactically unspoken. Metal sculptures and petri dishes meet with ready-made wigs, canes, or jewelry. Are these ruins? Or signs of a world only now being born?
Looking at the digital watch on the wrist of the clawed spider creature and the moss balls in the form of an alien tail, I’m reminded of the 2015 music video for the song “Sticky Drama” by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), which he directed together with Jon Rafman. In the music video, teenagers fight wearing costumes studded with Tamagotchi, with weapons made from discarded gadgets. Visually and thematically, “Sticky Drama” is ruled by a different aesthetic, but its relationship to the neglected materiality of reality is similar.
Just like the girl in the music video who dances in a dress made of CDs, Sýkorová’s heroes take ordinary, overlooked objects and endow them with a meaning-making that goes far beyond their (often exhausted) usefulness. The AirPods Raja wears in her ears seem to remind us: Today’s cutting-edge technology will one day be part of a layer of electrical waste enveloping a warming planet. Is the t-shirt of the popular (and rather post-humanist) anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion merely a trendy coincidence or an attempt at an archaeology of the present? Lopatin and Sýkorová are also linked by a sonic language full of distorted surfaces that range from extraterrestrial heights to ambient, artfully blending a cool mechanical quality with hints (or perhaps the last signs) of humanity.
But where the performance took place is also important. Instead of trying for a believable illusion and setting Brood – Stranger’s Vial – Womb somewhere in nature, for example, Sýkorová filmed it in a marble-floored corridor in the Museum of Music, driving a productive wedge between fiction and present-day reality. We never forget that even though the LARP characters may be humanoid cat-like scavengers or gracefully undulating eels, art is always ultimately—willingly or not—in dialogue with the context of the here and now. What’s more, in a museum—a space dedicated to traditional forms of knowledge and its accumulation—objects from our world, and yet a different world, come to life with all the more urgency.
One could write about the cyborgism inherent in the characters in the video—which goes beyond “mere” sensory extension as the transformed bodies carry with them new forms of desire (the narrator speaks of myriad obsessions). One could analyze the sparing work with visual effects, which make use of contemporary graphic language but never slip into mannerism and on the contrary complete the emotional register of the plot taking place in an ambiguous space between (distant?) stars. But perhaps most powerful in the end is the alienating open-endedness which—despite the fact that this is a LARP and a recording of it—reveals possibly unforeseen avenues of the viewer’s imagination.
Brood – Stranger’s Vial – Womb is a “game that has forgotten its own rules” and “a story without an ending.” Instead of a clear, linear fantasy, it offers a fantasy space that we view through several layers of material and media abstraction. It makes everyday objects and (in)human identities special. Natália Sýkorová’s video works a bit like the mirror mentioned in the introduction. It invites us to notice the affects of humanity in the midst of the climate crisis, which can only be glimpsed through peripheral vision, somewhere at the edge of gilded metal. Just beware: The sides will be reversed.
