Aleuronové Zrno

At first, there was softness—a substance that yields to touch. Organs of other worlds formed under the pressure of sediments, residual memories and the heat of transformation. Somewhere between sleep and decay, presence is born—not as a midpoint, but as a tense moment between a past that has not disappeared and a future that refuses to arrive. In this biosphere—after time, after names, after boundaries—what Donna Haraway calls ‘staying with the trouble’ still trembles. There is no resolution here, only continuation. The bodies, or their remains, are not testimonies to individuals but an embodiment of interconnectedness. Each layer bears the trace of the touch of something else, something unrecognisable: an animal, mycelium, a restless mineral. Nela Britaňáková's installation is not a reconstruction; it is an event to which we cannot relate from the outside. It is necessary to enter it as if entering soil that does not yet know what it will bear. Ceramic matter, textile growths, stiff seams and damp packaging—none of this serves the eye, but the touch of thought. It is a world in which it ceases to matter who began and who will end. Each actant (see Jane Bennett) has its share in the duration, its own performance within the network of material life. This network has no centre. The idea of dominance, hierarchy, purpose—all of that has been left behind the walls of greenhouses and laboratories that once promised growth. There is no growth here—only transformation. It is an ecology of instability, where every fibre knows it is not alone, and every body senses that it is no longer exclusively human. But what initially appeared to be a timeless landscape is suddenly disrupted by movement. Performance comes into play as an inner disturbance (or perhaps a rhythm?) of the organic system. The body is not an interpreter, but a component—non-hermetic, changeable, always half inside, half outside. Partly a disruptive element, partly a medium of communication. In stuttering gestures, accelerated breathing, fatigue inscribed in matter, what cannot be grasped except through physicality comes to life. The movements taking place here are not choreographies, but escapes. Unstable remnants of biotas, half-creatures, half-environmental situations, drift through a time that has ceased to be a measure. Bareness is not uncovered here but sedimented like layers beneath the roots of plants that have given up growth. Costumes are not clothing but habitats. Physicality is not a carrier of meaning here but a bearer of sensitivities. In this biosystemic fiction, memory does not work as an archive, but as feedback from past touches, restless connections and unfinished forms. The aleurone grain is not a centre, but an encrypted possibility: the seed of life that does not return but remains open. And so it persists here—not in hope or in sorrow but in the unnameable. Before the face of a material that does not want to become an object but a testimony. Before a time that leads nowhere. Before a story that has no beginning and no end. The grain breathes here. Perhaps it is sprouting. Perhaps it never stopped. The performance was created in collaboration with Tereza Miškaříková, Viola Jásková and Weru Špundová.