Liberation or, alternatively: Promethean Conquest. The Doctrine of Sediments. What of matter? What direction is matter taking? Anarchive. The Song of the Hoe. Communism of the senses.

HDV, 11:42, 2013

The video film was created as part of the exhibition in the Czech and Slovak Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale. The theme of the international exhibition was the city on the lagoon itself. The film perceives Venice as a metaphor and symptom of contemporary capitalism. As a materialised neuralgic point, thanks to which we can see everything in a small but hundredfold magnified form. The contradictions and incommensurability that nourish them are intertwined with the desire for power and the narcissism of representations.

Commissioned for the Pavilion of the Czech Republic and the Slovak republic at the 55th international Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Script:

One writer in Venice recollected how, as a child, he had once written a manuscript about a dystopian society. That society resembled ours, but it was also a precise description and depiction of a concentration camp.

What, then, is matter gravitating towards?
Where is it headed?
What is happening to matter?
Is it even an important question?

How long will mankind be paralyzed by anxiety before it regains its courage and trust in the future?
All further acquisition of knowledge, however exalted, is futile if we forget the liberation of all peoples and the struggle for such liberation –
even though we do not know today how to lead that struggle.
Sometimes (because it so often happens that events repeat themselves) one looks around and suddenly realizes that the course of things is not at all self-evident. One ceases to believe they make sense.
This happens frequently when desire meets satisfaction and in their wake come paranoid disquiet and anxiety.

This melancholic place.

This same writer saw in this city a mirror image of reality.
When he spoke of his writing, he claimed that he said nothing, that he had nothing to say, that what he would like to say was inutterable and what he actually said was neutral, bland and forever a mark of that which was already gone.
I write because we lived side-by-side, because I was one of them, a shadow surrounded by their shadows, a body in proximity to their bodies. The written word is a memorial to their deaths and a confirmation of my life.

I, as a reader, read with a sensation of participation, of sharing, of fellowship with others.
Chance determines how collections and sets are created and chance determines how they are used.
In a dream someone asked me:
What is matter gravitating towards?
Impulsively I replied:
To the communism of the senses!!
Here is the solar system in a certain stage of its development.
Here am I with an iron pointer.

It is somehow reminiscent of the Sumerian Song of the Hoe:
Enlil hastened to separate Earth from Heaven with his hoe.
He established tasks, destiny was determined.
Enlil praised his hoe.
He dug the earth with his hoe, he placed the first people in the mould.

This place personifies my desires, but they are universal desires. I have identified them as the desires of a self-infatuated age. We have long since given up hope of liberation. We have long since given up on the future.
We gather together here in this submerging city to convince ourselves that something still makes sense.
Sometimes memory is like a shop window in which everything is displayed like goods.
Sometimes memory is like the sea, like sediment on the seabed. Everything sinks slowly to the seabed. Sometimes it is necessary to strike a blow to the seabed, churn up its individual layers and reconnect them in a new mixture that will float to the surface.

Collective sediments are composed from the mass of things that have accumulated over the ages and were once consciousness, but have gradually dissolved into obscurity.
The expansive ocean floor, where all cultures, all enlightenment, all movements of thought and will, all social revolts, all struggles and intrigues rest in a formless sludge.
Awakening as a parable of recollection.
Sleeping mankind gives itself up to death for the interim, awaiting a chance to hoodwink its way out of death’s clutches.
The most ancient laws and social hierarchies apparently persist today, founded on debasement and enslavement.
And how does that relate to this place? Before it submerges, that is? This place is a concentrated reflection of the long-standing status quo on the brink of change.
What is continuity? The longue durée, rapid processes within slow processes? Can it be interrupted?
And what of leaps, sudden bounds? Sudden leaps and bounds – an insoluble problem of human thought. The stratification of the cosmos as the neurological heritage of mankind.
Consciousness of this is our Promethean conquest. The turning point can only be discerned by looking at continuity in the longue durée, in the longest possible timeframe.
We are sedimentary beings, created with infinite configurations of relationships with others.
Communism was always present and always will be. It is the foundation of all social relationships, the ontological grounds of sociality.
The anthropological view: the sum total of human experience, both individual and collective.
Manufactory: the isolation of individuals is the underlying principle.
Factory: the uninterrupted connection of individual processes. Machinery exacerbates exploitation instead of improving the human condition.
Film: the development of all forms of opinions, of every pace and rhythm prefabricated by the machines of today; the only form in which everything can explode.
An image that moves in time. I don’t know if film liberates. The familiar is alienated. The strange and foreign appear familiar. Day or night, each appears marvelous. Nothing you encounter confuses you. You don’t know where one thing ends and another begins.
Film is a place where memory is fettered. Field research is essential; equality to all the senses! The Paleolithic painters painted in narrow cave corridors, the universe closed around their bodies. When this city submerges, mankind will build a new one, an anatomical city according to the structure of our bodies. The sediment of world events as manifested in the structure of the brain.
To reveal and to conceal, to create and then immediately destroy.