Elena Pecenová↓

About the work

”…and there is no one else sitting in the driver“*

The beginning of my diploma project is based on an experience when I was looking at my phone for a long time while riding on a bus, until after a while I looked up and out of the window because the bus came to a halt. I watched what was going on outside for a while, and at first I failed to realize what I was seeing – there was a car parked by the side of the road after hitting the guardrail. The situation is peculiarly symptomatic of an everyday life influenced by digitality, a vivid connotation to the perception of visual material in a digital environment.

The experience of my performance has the ambition to translate what happened to me. However, it is not just about this image, but rather about a complex experience that has gradually emerged, and I have rediscovered and revisited it throughout my work. My paintings always relate to movement and speed/slowness, regardless of whether they translate into text or performance - my two main areas of interest. At the beginning there is an image and I do the translation - I translate it into a form. My work is always a certain type of translation.

Vrrroom vrrrrrroom, I‘m taking you on a road trip without a driver.

At the beginning there is a cleaned car body - the basic building block, the main object of my installation, which will be inhabited by my performative situation. The frame/object raises a lot of questions in me, forces me to grasp it, get a grip on it. All those purposeful depressions on the supporting frame leave a message of a past presence. The empty space speaks of existence even louder and more accurately than if it had remained full. It is the first and main piece of the puzzle – purely fascinating, it magnetizes channels, communicating affects, we speak to each other in our own language. But nothing in it stays in place. Where it is dark with no electricity, candles are needed. The main structural element I use to intervene in the frame/object is wax. Materially, this situation contrasts with the assumption that a car after a crash has oddly deformed parts, as if the rigid material melted like wax. My object/frame is a huge candle holder, with over a hundred lit original artist candles burning on it, formed as parts of the car – engine, exhaust, rear view mirrors. The orange light, the intimacy of a night drive on the highway, but the horizon is not moving – inside the car body we are inside a virtual environment. The ride, the movement, is created only by the performers. A 3+1 situation – three performers and the author, me, the driver, the narrator. Civility, without the optics of theatrical performance and its requisites, the situation unfolds, has a specific set of rules, reveals a process, a movement, a situation, but no moment is more important than the one that took place a moment ago. Not by reason, but by touch I stay in the play (Hands on a Hardbody) – you remain in touch, too. You can join the situation, and it is up to you whether you make it to the finish line, although your path may take you somewhere else.

* The title of the installation is a line from Luboš Svoboda‘s poem I Woke Up in the Middle of a Film Crew.