This project was the result of my conversations with my aunt. She emigrated to the USA in the 1980s, and after the revolution in 1989, she was denied the apartment she left behind. The decision on compensation made at the time – which resulted in her only receiving the initial fee she paid when joining the cooperative – was something my aunt described as a betrayal and an incomplete revolution. After the recent death of our grandfather, my aunt inherited a field, which she considered a little compensation for her sense of losing a home. The project asks what roles ownership can play in stories of security and self-determination, and whether this is really private ownership as we commonly understand it. An eponymous text was also created as part of the project, published as part of the publication Season Five: An Assortment of Contributions on Themes of Land, Art, and Commons.
Restlessness of Property / Nepokoje vlastního
2017
Restlessness of Property is an experimental documentary created on the basis of my conversations with my aunt. It explores the opportunities for connection and togetherness provided by images in a situation of the politically motivated division of body and place. The voice of a younger woman (the author) communicates her personal experience with a particular place, which the older woman only has in mediated form, through a memory. The camera always reveals the body, anchoring its possibility to inhabit the space through documentation. 3D simulations then allow for the connection of exact records of abandoned landscapes into a single whole, thus creating a new, individualised relief of memory spaces. In the film, the abandonment of physical presence is metaphorically linked to exhaustion of the body and to extraction.
Untitled – Poem / Bez názvu – báseň
2020
A visual poem created from snippets of my aunt talking about losing her home and her relationship to the inherited bit of land. The video consists of a series of 3D scans that work with material found at this location.
