Barbora Volfová↓

About the work

Actually, You Woke Up with the smell of orange on your fingers.

Actually, You Woke Up was created in long-term collaboration with Edita Štrajtová and comes as the second act of an installation called Wake Up Slowly, Butterfly, 2021.

A scene without a script that captures everyday existence. Even if the viewer seems to arrive late, as if the situation has already happened, he can still speculate and reconstruct the event. He becomes an observer of the inner world of the narrator.

From a general time perspective, the viewer arrives at a subjective perception of time, which reveals, against the backdrop of the scene, separate sections of a single moment, which in context form a new whole.

An inner, silent attention encloses the central object of the installation, which is formed by an imaginary circle of twelve arms that together form a chandelier. Its exploded and abstracted form refers to the source of light in the contemporary world, replacing sunlight and thus disrupting our daily cycle. Around the light source is a composition of stools that invite us to sit down and see the different perspectives.

The narrator explores the cyclical nature of time through the memory of an act that becomes a ritual. An ordinary repetitive activity that we are all familiar with, in which a bittersweet sticky liquid spurts out, leaving a trace behind and prompting us to find the perfect way to separate the skin from the delicious fruit.

Peeling an orange.

With each repeated peeling, the narrator performs the activity with more experience. His mind attempts to draw him into one of his stories. With a call to change or to preserve. He just notices it and brings his attention back to the present moment. The unrealized goal of his future is that perfectly peeled golden apple without wasting a single drop. His pursuit is pleading and full of the expectation of finding a unique way of doing it without making a mistake.

This utopian, relentless vision of finding the perfect, repeatable process, however, turns into a cycle that becomes a metaphor for the search for one‘s own ontological certainty, for inner stable security in the cyclical nature of time, the world of consumerist fantasy, pandemics, war and climate change. It does not seek a general starting point. It abandons the infinite course where we are controlled from the outside and defines its own rules and order. It denies linearity, and thus teeters on the edge within itself.