Natália Sýkorová

During the residency at MQ Natália Sýkorová together with CROSSLUCID shows the work Dwellers in the Waters at the MQ Art Box (Opening Mon 13.11., 18.30h).

In her current research called “Sensory Solidarity” Natália Sýkorová is interested in the possibilities of speculative modeling of future climate collapse scenarios, and in particular the potentialities of individual and collective resistance. In this regard, her main interest is the adaptation of sensory and bodily experience vis a vis ongoing climate changes, as well as sensory reactions to environmental anxiety. She studies solutions on several levels –performative, object, interpersonal and digital.

Her sculptural work examines technological agencies of objects and their inner dependence as naturecoultures. Her sculptures reflect upon meteorological agrarian mythologies rooted in Slavic folklore. Weather in Slavic legends and mythology has been worked with for centuries to create prediction rituals. She treats these predictions as myth-making territories, self-programming, self-alienating, de-stabilizing How can we challenge the concept of climatic collapse in conventional humanism, which is destined to a pre-made apocalypse? “Our” kind of collapse happens in an everyday landscape, which induces a sense of its realness. We ask, "what does the end of the Earth have to do with the 'end of the world'?" in the current age of the Anthropocene.

The performative aspect of the project is studying performative aspects of non-human protagonism, when partnering objects and stories of collaborative survival/extinction. She assembles performative workshops and LARP experiences as a research methodology. In reaction to instruction-based script writing the participants create partnership with objects as a form of non-human protagonism. They participate in a series of games, exercises and conversations involving different avenues of complicity between the human protagonist, the world of objects and climate. The space they occupy is drifting and is simulated by their actions, as if the act itself projected a social space. They aspire to imagine and together create social and cultural alternatives through movements, noises, masking, and play. They become part of speculations about teleportation, generative stories about silence, extraterrestrial help, legends and mythologies about contamination, healing, and solidarity and disintegration while together forming a story of collaborative survival.