Nela Pietrová↓

About the work

Ocean of Me

In her research, Nela Pietrová has long focused on the uncontrollable physical transformations that take place inside queer bodies through interaction with hormones, chemical substances, and trauma. She tries to grasp her subjective experience through material transformations, both digital and organic. She focuses on moments when fragile or liquid matter materializes into durable and solid form, when nature is turned into two-dimensional pixels and takes on a new body in a 3D interface, or when a digital body reenters the physical world. The theoretical framework for her work is an exploration of monstrosity from a postcolonial queer perspective, combined with scientific findings about entities that by their very nature do not conform to the human construct of gender dichotomy.

In her graduation work Ocean of Me, Nela Pietrová focuses on temporality and memory, on traumatized and queer bodies’ relationship with the future. In this, she draws on American academic and author Jack Halberstam’s queer theory of time and on French philosopher Catherine Malabou’s theory of destructive plasticity. In her written thesis, she associates queer temporality with traumatic temporality: the non-linear passage of time that connects and disconnects these bodies from linear reproduction and from heteronormative notions of the future, trapping them in cyclical time loops.

Pietrová’s main motif or starting point is the body as a living archive capable of experiencing different temporalities at the same time; a body inspired by corals that live, die, and become fossilized in one moment; the bodies of the Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish, which can return to the polyp stage when it experiences trauma; and metamorphic rocks that recrystallize under extreme conditions and erase the traces of other bodies, which as a result become an integral part of the rock. Nela Pietrová works with marble, a geological medium of deep time. Interventions in the body of marble are a means by which she can approach immortality. Contrasting with this are fragile and impermanent organic bodies, carriers of associative ideas, and their dead artifacts.