LEVIATHAN´S WET DREAM
About Leviathan’s Wet Dream / text by Karina Kottová
The film Leviathan’s Wet Dream represents a hypnotizing transformation of humankind to the “water age”. Earthly waters become so polluted with chemicals, pharmaceuticals and other toxic substances as an effect of the human insensitivity to nature that, in return, the waters start acting as a collective hallucinogen, causing altered states of mind, as well as alterations of actual bodies. Human physiology gets closer to that of water beings or even monsters in a both orgiastic and somewhat terrifying journey. People change to amphibians, partly terrestrial and partly aquatic creatures, neither fully real nor virtual. Daily experiences and routines become psychedelic, surreal, unpredictable. Sharing contaminated water through both our bodies and our environment is the new status quo, a point of departure or a point of no return. Our consciousness is expanded to a new dimension. Are we setting up an ecological disaster in order to improve ourselves? And what is the place for love in this process? Transhumanistic apocalypse is on the horizon. Coming soon.
LYRICS
Imagine the Ocean
slowly rising up
The Water is gently flooding rocks
forests
pet shops
supermarkets
religious institutions
universities
Sea levels are rising
Water is flooding the land
The Water age has come
Water is also flowing
towards you
and caresses your feet
Notice, how cozy you feel
You stepped out of the Water
but the Water
has returned to you
You were made of each other
Ocean came to you
To meet you again
They are here
And you like it so much
Leviathan’s Wet Dream Installation
FUJ TAJXL!!!
About Fuj tajxl!! / text by the author
Fuj tajxl!! is the way to the underworld. You descend into darkness and recollect what you have displaced long ago. You encounter the hairy-horned in the form of a shadow, a male archetype. Do you have a déjà vu? The devil is a powerful weapon of patriarchy and, simultaneously, what it fears the most. He is the medium of knowledge, the addition to the full. He burns! His horns hypnotize. He boasts a balance of the two principles of dualism but also an insurmountable gap between them. You have a hard-on. The silent tension covers the deafening image of naturalness like a foam. You move away by a hair‘s breadth with each shave. A little boy, intoxicated by infantilism, frets in your tailbone. It tickles. You dig out a beast and kiss it, giggling. It would like to penetrate you from behind. You taste the paradox. You freak, you transcend. The beat from the bottom announces an initiation ritual. You synchronize your mental speed-rhythm with the invisible. You become the boy in order to sacrifice yourself. You shrink; you are suffocated at heights of an adult body, far from the ground, far from children‘s consciousness when it was still milky. Don‘t sleep – you‘ll become a man tonight! Dance!
The Czech phrase ‘fuj tajxl’ expresses disgust, contempt, fright. It also has the form of ‘fuj tajbl’ or ‘fuj tajfl’, conspicuously related to the German ‘der Teufel’ – devil. With these words on your tongue, it is as if you have a sword with which you cut off something foreign that you do not want to identify with. You try to kill things that ruin your notion of yourself. By casting the “Fuj tajxl!!” spell, you defend yourself against a specific entity and ensure a safe distance from it. What is happening in the background of this mental act? How deep, dusty and petrified is the abyss between you and the wet and disgusting one you feed every day ingeniously or unintentionally? No action will be left without consequences. A reaction is an action. You bring to life a third being – a personified abyss – feeding from the void between polarized realities, sharpened like two horns on the head of a giggling devil. The phrase ‘fuj tajxl’ is an address of the third one, which is contained within it. A spark is enough. By spoken word you create, by addressing you invite.
Fuj tajxl!!! Installation
BIO / Jan Matýsek is a visual artist and set designer who employs external and internal perceptions to create his own stories and myths and, through their associations and casualties, explains the phenomena between heaven and the Earth. He combines the subjects of transhumanism, ecofeminism and corporeality with the psychotherapeutic methods of hypnosis and incantation. Most of his videos lay emphasis on the imagination of the unconscious. He incorporates them in video installations – imagery, ritual spaces – that directly communicate with the audience and mediate their transformation or transcendence on the inner level. He draws inspiration from shamanic practices of initiation and awareness of the hidden. Matýsek graduated from the feminist New Media 2 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, also from the stage-design-oriented studio at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno, and completed an internship at Berlin UdK in the Experimental Film studio. He works as a curator in the Umakart Gallery in Brno.
CREDITS
Leviathan’s Wet Dream
Artwork by Jan Matýsek
Music & Sound / Natálie Pleváková
Director of Photography / Igor Smitka
Director Assistant / Marek Mrkvička
Camera Assistant / Filip Kettner
Choreography / Kateřina Konvalinová
Production / Klára Mamojková
Production assistant / Samuel Mrázik
Wet Girls on Fire / Anna Sedlmajerová, Kateřina Šillerová, Tereza Nesládková
Mermaids: Filip Tatýrek, Dominik Neudecker, Lenka Adamcová, Lucie Šillerová, Magdalena Rybanská, Tina Hrevušová, Tomáš Máčik, Vanda Michalská
Exhibited at Galerie TIC, Brno 2020
Exhibition curator / Zuzana Janečková
Installation PH / Eva Rybářová
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Fuj tajxl!!
Artwork by Jan Matýsek
Music / Natálie Pleváková/ natalieplevakova.cz/
Camera / Marek Mrkvička
Installation PH / Polina Davydenko
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Translation and edit / Františka Bůažková
