Sféry intimity

“I feed, protect and house them, they fuel and dress me.” 1 While listening to the soft hiss of a fermentation process, Zlata Ziborova’s Spheres of Intimacy surrounds us with microbial collaborations and metabolic processes. It comes to us as an insistent, yet discrete and meditative gesture. The series of objects, photographs and videos are in constant dialogue, exchanging positions, adding layers and finally becoming an integrated, living body. The flesh-like, leathery substance of SCOBY (symbiotic culture of yeast and bacteria used in making kombucha tea) reminds us of aging, withering bodies as well as its regenerative and adaptive potential. The installation, forming an intestinal home, counters the established dualistic paradigm and blurs the lines between psyche and soma. Their inseparable relation and transformation from one to the other is illustrated by millions of bacteria in our gut, which deeply affect our behavior and well-being. A series of chemical reactions within the kombucha fermentation process is responsible for bacteria multiplication, yielding healthy acids and a strong, thin biostructure that heals wounds. Human and more-than-human interdependency reveals more than just its benefits – it can also teach us about power relations, deeply connected to both ecological issues and social inequality. Drawing from research of raw materials, Zlata Ziborova works with organic materials that can be found or are automatically considered waste. She reconfigures her own body hair and blood into useful materials, creating a poetic connection between production, intimacy and art. Exposing this processual assemblage resists fixed identities as all matters are moving, decaying or growing. My Body is an Environment, suspended from the ceiling and painted with menstrual blood, resembles tissue and cellular patterns. Representing a body, it is plural, fluid, unrecognizable. This posthuman ontology “challenges the primacy of human heteronormative reprosexuality as the cornerstone for proliferating life, yet without washing away a feminist commitment to thinking the difference of maternal, feminine, and otherwise gendered and sexed bodies.” 2 My Body is a Factory consists of multitudes of small objects. Each ceramic part is shaped against the body, painted with blood and decorated with hair, carrying a distinctive imprint and DNA. The various biological materials bring out what usually stays hidden, their fragility and intimacy becomes inherently public. The screens reflect their subtle shimmering movement on to the glass basins – everything in the room becomes through its relations. Personal matters shape the shared environment as the gallery turns into a space of cohabitation, an unsettling, yet restful search for nurture and belonging. Zlata Ziborova is a Prague-based multimedia artist. She is currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and has completed internships at The Visiting Artist Studio of AAAD in Prague, The Studio of Visiting Artist at AVU in Prague, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at TROP Institute for Artistic Research in Ljubljana with Maja Smrekar. Zlata Ziborova is interested in ecofeminist theory and interspecies relations. Working with organic waste, she develops collaborations with bacteria, yeast and animals. Since 2021, she has been working on a project My Body is a Factory which strives to reuse and rely on her own body’s production. Working with body hair and blood, she becomes the primary source of materials used in her works. She has participated in exhibitions at Galeria Labirynt in Lublin, Pop-up Gallery AVU, Studio Prám, Museum and Gallery in Prostějov, Světova 1 and Gallery sam83. Mia Milgrom is an artist and curator based in Prague, Czech Republic. She co-runs an independent artist space and gallery in Prague, Garage Gallery. In her practical and theoretical work, she is fascinated by the tension created by unstable and troubled environments, systems of support and the increasingly exhausted relations of the human and nonhuman world. Her sculptures and installations oscillate between the fragile moment of falling apart and an intuitive symbiosis of the elements. Her works have been exhibited at Fait Gallery, the 4th Tbilisi Triennial, at the Cooper Union in New York and others. 1 Zlata Ziborova’s statement 2 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water – Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Bloomsbury Academic (2017), p. 4