Sensus Communis
Physicall / object theatre and sound puppetry
2024
Continuo Theatre
Anna Luňáková
Jakub Štourač
Sensus Communis is a performative project on the border between sound poetry, sound puppetry and object theatre. Are there things we can only learn by hearing? How does our perspective become inverted if we choose hearing instead of visuality as our initial sense of knowledge?
Sensus communis, a term also known as "common sense," looks at how our sensory perception inscribes itself into our overall understanding of the world around us. And is it even the same world we are all living in? The theatrical adventure of listening is based on the idea that there are uncharted territories, absent worlds and multitudes of absent people or events to be brought back to the sensus communis by listening. The anonymous figures of the two "operators" as executors of an unknown, bureaucratic but also uncontrollable imaginative power.
Sound, as a natural part of our lives, takes on mythical dimensions in the performance as an object that cannot be perceived with a single glance; noise as a natural part of inhabited areas, but also of the cries of nature or cosmic space. Sound as a material from which and with which the most seemingly ordinary thing can be brought to life; because, after all, even the ordinary waste that we so easily dispose of can be its fantastic source. The specific memory of resonance embodied in tape recordings, which record unrepeatable moments just like photographs, can bring back those who have been deprived of words. Is it possible, with sufficient concentration, to perceive everything that has ever happened, is happening and will happen?
Foundations of the Work of the Sun (Základy Práce Slunce)
Experimental short film from analogue photos.
14 min
2023
Anna Luňáková
Jakub Štourač
In the end, all the benefits must not be consumed by time. Therefore, where the Sun works, the overall untidiness of the world is replaced by new foundations. Short narrative of the legs - factographic poem about the journey to work.
"Leibniz inspired poem in a setting of Andrej Platonov's pit."
The Foundations of the Work of the Sun (2023) is a short film-poem consisting of interconnecting “micro-essays” that collectively constitute a “fictional documentary” about the work of the sun. Inspired by (among other things) G.W. Leibniz’s theory of a pre-established harmony and his contributions to the science of optics, the film reflects on how the camera “translates” sunlight into intelligible images and how a photograph might be understood as the visual document of an embodied perspective. Based on a poetic sound composition, each story in the film touches on themes of labor, exhaustion, and utopianism. One chapter alludes to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1968), while another follows the story of a worker whose life is recorded in photograms, snapshots, and prints. Taken together, these “micro-essays” address the question: How to think collectively through the individual?
Atlas babiček
(The Atlas of Grandmothers)
Children book
Published by Viriditas
2022
Tonička je normální holka. Teda… skoro. Když dostane k prvním kulatým narozeninám úplně obyčejné klubko, neobyčejně se jí změní život. Magie ji obklopuje na každém kroku. Vydává se na kouzelné putování napříč časem a prostorem: od starověké Mezopotámie přes Paříž až po Čínu. Objevujte s Toničkou tajemství babiček! Setkáte se s významnými i skoro zapomenutými hrdinkami světových dějin a společně s Toničkou rozpletete červenou nit rodokmenu. A co vy, znáte všechny svoje babičky?
André Gorz:
Dopis pro D.
(André Gorz:
A Letter for D.)
Translation
Published by Malvern
2021
The letter by André Gorz, a philosopher of Czech-Austrian origin, is not only a declaration of love but also a recapitulation of the author's political and ecological thinking. In it, Gorz looks at the ways in which philosophical thinking distanced him from what was truly essential: living together with the person he loved. Uneasy, fragile and honest. In his text, Gorz interrogates the relationship between philosophy and the love of partnership and also touches on the idea of love in general. In place of tragic unfulfillment, we read the life story of two people who managed to live together for almost sixty years without the source of their love being exhausted.