The Stair Case -Nah …Nobody Home (Ding-Dong Lullaby)

Proto Gallery Systems functions as a nomadic tool that, through practice, explores new approaches to collective creation and curation; it gives space to experiment with the implementation of complex artistic outputs and their subsequent presentations. The most recent series, titled Clueless Agency, nonlinearly develops a story inspired by the genre of detective novels, in an attempt to articulate the relationship to chaos and its influence on the socio-cultural perception of reality. The following documentation captures a one-day, off-site show and a performance that took place at a former publishing house in Prague, Czech Republic. This performative event served as a symbolic point of closure for a string of shows that developed over time as a part of the Clueless Agency series. However, it was an ending that did not simply look back but also rushed forward: Entering the house, visitors were invited up the squeaking stairs to join a young/old lady in her curious cartomancy. Forced to pass through the raging buzz of a ghostly drone darting around the stairwell, they sat down at her table as she offered them a cup of tea, apparently sweetened by the squirming contents of an antique porcelain sugar bowl. Photographs scattered across the table in front of her presented them with a spatial and temporal confusion: altered, twisted, and technologically fictionalized glimpses of past shows threatened to distort and fracture any definite reminiscence, much like the troubled and fragmented memory of a deranged detective – a figure who lurked in the background of all Clueless Agency productions. Like the recollections held in his confused mind, these photographs extrapolated and twisted the previous exhibition documentations, which were fed into a neural network model and spat out back into the world as weird clones of the project’s past, instantly becoming a no-less real part of the story – the full extent of which will be published in a forthcoming book in which all “cases,” including the “stair-case,” come together. Since 2021, the Clueless Agency exhibition series has taken place in a burnt-out hut in the Iron Mountains, in FUTURA Centre for Contemporary Art (Karlin Studios), in the Prison Museum Uničov during UFF 11, at Montez press radio and No Moon in New York, on the board of a half-submerged ocean liner MS Mediterranean Sky in Athens, and at a fusion reactor facility of Tokamak Golem in Prague – with the upcoming shows to take place at the Královice stables.