I attempt to surpass the knowledge defined often in a binary of a ‘normalcy’ and ‘pathologies’, inquiring into and subverting the notions of the ‘diagnostic’. The ever-changing maps empower and bring us to a notion of a fluidity, towards the need of respect and honouring a capacity to listen deeply, to be(come) receptive, susceptible.

I am Czech/international artist with a long term interest in mapping topics of natural and social ecologies, queerness, intimacy, performance, care, healing, and the erotic (ref. Audre Lorde). My main medium is a body itself, in all its somatic, dancing, political and social knowledgeable range. How do we embody and narrate our bodies and relationships between them?

Weaving a variety of topics through different media, I work mainly in the media of performance, facilitation, lecture and installation and seeking arts’ potential to create transformative temporary autonomous zones and bring forth potent dreams for the futures. I work solo as well as in numerous collaborations (see some of those listed in the section ‘collaborations’).

I also studied history of art and archaeology of Africa and Asia (SOAS, University of London) delving into the construction of body/ies in performances and rituals, the overlap of the social and the spritiual and into the criticim of exoticising/pathologizing of arts created by variously marginalized artists, including the social function(s) of art.

Among my other practices belongs the art of touch including bodywork and energy work (certified in various types, see section dedicated to ‘bodywork’) and folkloric herbalism. I practice as a compagnion/ritualist and have also finished a certified one year study of Clinical Naturopathy (Škola Klinické Naturopatie, 2019-2020). 

I looks at models of ‘artistry’ as intertwined with a set of socio-economic and interpersonal and inter-species relations and attempts to temporarily embrace certain categories or – at other times – to deconstruct them. I live and create in the world, where ‘craft’ is not only art, but also a root of ‘leechcraft’ or ‘witchcraft’, ‘glamour’ shares an ethymological root with ‘grimoir’ underlining my capacity to emphasize poetically the extraordinary in the mundane experiences, breaking the divide between the secular and the spiritual through an everyday vernacular mysticism. I honour the beauty of the ephemeral, grief and celebration, the queer and the carnivalesque, touch and visionary thinking-feeling (ref. sentipensar).

My practices are further informed by contemporary dance, circus (aerial hoop and contortion), butoh, Generative Somatics, anthropology (and challenging its gaze), kink/bdsm, activist practices, painting, sensing, poetry, oracular traditions and possibilities of language and communication, theatre, rituals, parties, cabaret, drag and relationship practice.

 

 

I worked with artists with diverse embodiment and non-neuronormative behaviour and worked as a physiotherapist for people with physical impairments. In queer activism and feminism, I visit topics of ecofeminism, intersectionality, bi/pan activism, youth activism and trans rights. I inquire into different strands of magic, notion of the extra-sensory inception, birth, death and grieving research, biology, environmental studies, European herbal remedies, energy work and bodywork, witchcraft and its diverse contextualisation across time and different cultural/social groups. Another of my past experiences is providing peer counselling in a multi-national, -faith and -cultural environment at the United World College of the Adriatic (2010-2011).

I delight in searching for the ‘kernel of joy’* through art, poetry, breath, dance, for the erotic in its broadest sense, the creative life force, the life and its cycles and endings, which is an antithesis to the plasticized packaged sensations, freeing the ‘erotic’ from a solely sexualized, anthropocentric and social context, where this misunderstanding capitalizes on serving us an idea of a disconnectedness from this source and incompleteness. I try to inquire into a possibility to reclaim it for our wellbeing instead of a status and image, into an attempt to learn, build and share ideas for our human wholeness while recognizing our individual longings and humbling interdependency and honouring  choices, queering the variety in which we can conduct our relationship(s) to the world and one another. My mission is to seek and create ecologies of pleasure and intimacy as an antidote to extractive nature of  exploitative systems we currently live in.

*Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’