Overstimulated, oversaturated, worn out and chronically undervalued. You’re creating your identity while you look at your reflection in the mirror. You're trying to solve your hypersensitivity by using ceramides to repair your skin barrier. How does it feel to be here completely alone?
Swarming Tongues is an exhibition focused on the medicalisation of feelings, anxieties of late-stage capitalism and the decay of intimate connections in the environment of emotional excess. By exfoliating the calloused layer of dishonest performativity, a wound is uncovered, caused by the uninterrupted strain put upon an individual by an uncompromising system. Still fresh and unhealed after all these years. This personal pain becomes a communication tool used to build a shared awareness and transform survival from an individual event to a collective one.
The project is based on the assumption that the body is not an isolated unit, but an intertwined archive of layers of memories of pain, lust, exhaustion and addiction. For Silvia Federici the body is a place of historical records of discipline and resistance against the power of the patriarchal system. This is also similarly reflected in the Health Communism by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, which explores the institutionalisation of people with various forms of mental health issues. According to this book, a healthy body is not thought of as an individual norm, but rather as a politically formed zone, in which the value of a life is decided on. Swarming Tongues does not focus on or specify any type or kind of body, it is dedicated to all non-normative bodies and groups which exist at the peripheries of societies.
In the everyday performativity of relationships and self, the language of the texts inside the exhibition breaks the norms of narration and becomes an act of resistance against the linearity of progress and performance. The author's personal speech from her moleskin pages is hyperbolised by white mass, setting up a mirror, in which one observer can explore the insides of another through their own reflection. Here, repeatedly unachieved stereotypical life goals are shared with the world, along with the solutions that the system violently offers up. Grandaxin, Seroquel, ketamine, tobacco and alcohol as a chemical control of survival and duct tape over the vast wound of failure.
The analogy of pressed, repeatedly stretched and forcefully conformed fondant directly refers to bodies, which are subordinated to social, medical and economical structures. Matte, soft, sensitive, weak. Unable to resist, yet forced to adapt to the unfavourable construction of society and survive in an overaffected form.
By using a sweet, elastic, malleable and simultaneously unstable sugar mass, the artist works with the image of the body as a commodity. A body shaped according to the dictates of visual taste, normative notions of beauty and marketing strategies that wrap emotional emptiness in a sticky appeal. The fondant transforms into a metaphor for addiction to sweet illusions, both seductive and ambiguous, akin to the promises of a system that hides exhaustion and pain beneath a glossy, sugary surface.
As Ben Ware writes in his book On Extinction: Beginning Again At The End hope is no longer an expectation of better tomorrows, but an act of perseverance amidst the decay of society. The exhibition also expands upon the concept of nihilistic hope, which was defined by the theorist David Chandler. Hope in this concept is not an internal state, blind optimism, or pink, bright, blinding, sparkly, distorted version of the future. Hope is a shared practice of survival and resilience.
Therefore, the exhibition does not look for solutions. It doesn't offer solace. Instead it documents survival as a series of everyday acts of defiance. It rejects the romanticization of pain, but at the same time does not erase it. In this project, the author does not present a testimony of healing, but of a constant circling around wounds that cannot heal. In a space where pain is omnipresent, the voice becomes an ambiguous signal, shaky, disjointed, but still alive.
And exactly in this dissonance, something shared is born: a language, which does not give instructions, yet it reflects chaos. Words, which don't promise forgiveness, but they suffer the consequences. A shared reading of overexposed vulnerability creates an invisible community of common pain and offers collective resilience through acceptance of systemic collapse. A swarm, which doesn't fly in harmony, but vibrates like a seismograph of sensitivity. At a time when emotions are a product, productivity a condition of existence, and loneliness a structural prerequisite for survival, an alternative sensibility is born here. Substandard and tired, but persistent and determined to resist.
In the text We Have Never Been Individuals Scott Gilbert emphasises that the idea of biological individualism is an illusion, a simplified fiction, which does not accurately reflect the real complexity of our being. Our bodies are a network of living and dying organisms, interconnected ecosystems, which constantly construct new configurations of many genomes. In light of this revelation, resistance cannot be understood as an individual, singular performance, because if it remains so, it will at best save the individual, but it won't in any way damage the power structure, which persists. The system is always convincing us that strength lies in separation and autonomy, but it is the sharing of vulnerability that makes true collective survival possible.
Balberčáková then further explores digital platforms as a space, where vulnerability becomes a commodity. The Internet becomes a space of an unending performance of identity, where authenticity is pushed out into nonexistence. Swarming Tongues of our online selves are amplified, but yet purposefully controlled. In this space, intimate experience becomes a "spectacle." The embodiment of our pain plays out endlessly, in a loop.
The writer and activist Rebecca Solnit compares hope to the blade of an axe, which we use to break down the door in an emergency. It is an action. An attack, not a wait. Nihilistic hope, which does not originate from any faith in a better future. Hope as the ability to connect with what is hidden. Hope as collective survival even in a time of global collapse.
Swarming Tongues does not present an answer, but it asks a question. One which repeats, comes back and never stays answered. Like a shudder. Like a memory of a body. Like a swarm that can't fly far away, but can't stop pulsating
Persisting in the fabricated reflection of society, in the intense limbo of repeated loss of self, transforms our voices from isolated cries to collective dissonance. The out of tune frequencies grow in number and our oscillating tongues together form a swarm of resistance.
Has Tretinoin 0.5% ever asked you how your day at work went? How many times has your AI chatbot boyfriend hugged you today? Skin with no wrinkles, hair with no split ends, 2g of protein per 1kg of body weight, 10k steps a day, 500k karma on Reddit, 17.6k Instagram views and 222 people on your TikTok Live. How does it feel to be here completely alone?
Text: Doris Sisková
Edit: S. Ďurošová
technical and production support, curatorial collaboration
Jan Bražina, Marie Vařeková
