#plzen2015

We arrived to Spinnerei and we were tired but amazed; what an impressive and inspiring place. Aleš Čermák was outside Halle 14, we wished him luck and got into the non-for-profit art space. Claudia, the coordinator of the artist in residence, kindly showed us the building and took us to the set. The show started.

Video. Sound. Light. Text. Body. Action.

The actress in front of us, Jindřiška Křivánková, is now staring at us with a penetrating and incisive expression. Her silhouette mixtures and changes with the different sounds and video behind her. She speaks "first, it is necessary to choose a suitable car. Not every car has the ideal proportions and not all of them can comfortably fit a body. It is important to pick the right car, because the journey tends to be extremely long and exhausting and one often has to wait inside for a long time in conditions which are far from ideal for human beings". While she says the last sentence her finger and eyes are pointing to the man standing up in the right side of the set, Abdirezak Yusuf. He has a big, yellow and direct spotlight in front of him. She approaches him and the public starts thinking "is he a refugee? Has he arrived by car in these inhuman conditions? Has he gone through all of this situation?”

Now the big screen catches all of our attention. We watch videos recorded by the police in the borders. Hard images to assimilate: hidden bodies inside cars, car crashes in the attempt to escape detention, and so on. The performance is arriving to its end, and we can feel our bodies tense up. Applause. More applause. We can firmly vouch for this performance; it won’t leave you indifferent.

After the discussion forum we went to a bar and had the chance to talk with Aleš and we could even better understand his performance. Polo Shirt (discipline) is the second piece of his project called The Premonition of the Oncoming Failure.

"I defined the project as a 'social choreography' - a movement. The project consists of several disjointed episodes and is intentionally presented in different parts of Europe. It draws links among contemporary social issues – processes associated with bodily movements (vectors) and it attempts to analyse in broad, kinetic, philosophical, and geopolitical context the co-called topic of our time: The Migrant.

When I had been preparing the work-in-progress presentation in Wien in March 2015, a physical aspect of movement was a starting point. During the following year, according to a complementary thinking, I came out with an idea which could be defined as a transcendental disposition of an object. For example the 3rd episode is created through the text called: Movement instead of a stagnation – movement of a vector, http://predobraz.blogspot.cz/p/episoda-3.html. It is a general view point on a mobility, which is consolidated in a wider context. This is presented on a Migrant-figure, who becomes so-called 'Representative of our time' ('Object of our time'). According to the 3rd episode I have made a research in North Africa to gather new material for to 4th episode, which is going to be presented during the year 2016".

When asking about the questions we can read on the videos, Aleš keeps explaining "each epoch needs new impulses. What had been considered as a commonplace for years, doesn't exist anymore. The borders are expanding (in a geopolitical sense). Depending on this expansion, people are on move. The movement doesn't have to be only about war and conflicts. The movement from one place to another place allows a change, it allows to think differently. We are condemned to repetition, until one will come out with something new".

To sum up, we asked more about the theme of this second piece "everybody knows, that this way of migration is physically and mentally difficult. What is important for me is that the body is not an obstacle”.

It is true, that I was partially blasted off with certain experiences (Pachinko slots, Kabukicho and Nakano district, Electric city at Akihabara, non-presence for noise limit at places as Shibuya, Hokusai original shunga woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), gamification and commercialization of society, Onsen, and so on, and so on) but I have to confess that Japanese culture is very plausible to me. Although I got realized that Japanese way of doing things is about kind of obeying to given orders (i.e. there is kind of totality) I found many examples which stress an importance of individuality. This is how I interpreted my first impression with local unique architecture. Second: Japan (or maybe I should say only Tokyo because in fact I did not leave a city much) is for me a culture of extreme poles – on one side there is noise-color-chaotic life all around stations and on the other side you can just make few steps aside and find yourself in a tranquility of shinto or buddhistic temple. This mixture and extremes are somehow present also in daily culture where Shichi-Go-San traditional celebration is shaking hand with KFC celebration of Christmas. List of examples could continue…

Well but besides this many other events happened. Of course I tried to get know and comprehend Tokyo and Japanese culture which is completely impossible. Maybe this was subconscious feeling and motive why I made short performance called “Small I Japan”... Well – I get touched with local noise musicians as Hakobune (Takahiro Yorifuji) or LZ129 (Ryota Okazaki) and we organised some gigs around Shinjuku (Buena Art Space, Rental Space). In gallery we had a jam-session with Satoshi Ikeda and Yoko Arai. I visited all main national galleries and scientific museums and checked out also some smaller events (home based projects, some performances which were part of Tokyo experimental festival).

Whatever – let me say something about my “artistic mission”. In proposal I suggested that I – as a sound-artist – can work and develop multichannel sound system. That sound-system is to be open-source based on Raspberry Pi2 microcomputer and programmed in Pure Data. It is supposed to be modular – as number of sound channels is derived from number of Raspberry Pi clients – and it is supposed to be also variable – as system is using wireless WiFi network so it can be adjusted in any way to various spaces. This was defined as a “main goal” of residency and this work was presented at my final exhibition. I composed short electro-acustic composition Poème électronique pour le monde as a tribute to E. Varese. There is still a lot of issues to upgrade and solve which I am going to deal with during a spring 2016. There will be an exhibition in gallery Školská28 with title Nástrojáři (Instrument makers) where my sound-system will be presented. I am also give it a chance in theatre sound design as I will prepare a new piece with scenographer Kristýna Taübelová. After some upgrades and cleanup I will publish the whole project and code at GitHub as open-source.

Somehow important was meeting with philosopher and radio-artist Tetsuo Kogawa. We had long and intense discussion about livecoding, Prague, Franz Kafka, broadcasting and FM transmitters. Tetsuo designed minimal FM transmitter which he was using during his musical improvisations. I also implemented his design into my first exhibition which took place at Youkobo gallery. We are going also to continue in collaboration (which has already happened during a celebration of Art's Birthday event[1] and hopefully it will continue in our future Kafka project). Important was also meeting with feminist artist and performer Ito Tari who I personally visited and made some recordings with her. (Let me add that help of Youkobo team and help of Karin Písaříková was essential in getting in touch with mentioned artists.) Afterwards I implemented Tari's voice into my composition.

So generally I can say that I was very satisfied with my stay at Youkobo. I was faced to brand new and other culture which is always inspiring. And I had also time and space to work and experiment with new issues in my artistic practice – few times I even found myself so deeply sunk into my work that I was thinking to myself: “Hey, you are in Tokyo, you should get out and get some life...” So I followed my inner voices which is usually a good way... Just hope that our collaboration can continue somehow in the future.

Michal Cáb

The bus goes over a broken narrow tar road and enters a deep forest, or rather a “jungle”. At the end of this turn is a concrete monster, a former pulmonary sanatorium which is now empty. For some strange reason, the driver pulls up here at a decayed bus stop as if waiting for some ghosts to climb aboard. I, as the only passenger, feel insecure for a while and imagine a scene from a Hitchcock movie. Then the bus goes back and gradually gets to the TV tower. At the sight of the 176m-high tower I think that this part remembers better times. I don’t see any tourists or sightseers here. Just a man with a lawnmower and a bored cashier who collects 900 forints for an elevator ride to the first floor with a view. The tower clings to a graffiti-frescoed building, probably a former pub with a dance hall, or maybe, a hotel. I can see an old and yellowed menu on the receded plaster. A battered billboard with an advert for some music club; the only still legible word is “Hell”. How fitting. I don’t feel like going to the nearby woods with half-broken benches and strange concrete constructions of unknown purpose. The same goes for the tower which does not look so nice and modern at a closer look as it does from far away when I was admiringly looking up every day and waiting for a suitable opportunity to visit. It is true that the promised tourist trails really meet here but the maps and boards describing the location are either half-wrecked or destroyed by weather. I think that it is something the Club of Czech Tourists would not let happen.