Becoming Monika: An Exploration of a World between the Self, Other, I and We

Anna Chrtková

In a hyper-individualised, market-driven neoliberal world where everyone is considered responsible for their own success and happiness, the notion of a common or collectively lived future seems either naive or — given the Eastern and Central European experiences of failed state socialism — totalitarian. To this, the natural and social sciences offer a counter-hypothesis: We already are interconnected in terms of biological matter, ecosystemic relations, climate systems, shared societal infrastructure, and even global financial markets. Socialised as individuals, though, we lack the tools to refer, relate, and act towards this reality. Monika, besides being an organically formed name for the artistic collective of me and my two artist colleagues (Matyáš Grimmich and Karolína Schön), is a lens and shared body through which I offer entry to this framework. This exposition follows an ongoing performative research project on models of relating — becoming ‘we’ on the planetary, social, and political scale. The research centres on concepts of the expanded self and politics of unity, focusing on testing existing models or developing new methods of becoming more-than-just-self. Its participatory installations, video works, workshops, and research performances were tested and presented in residency and gallery spaces. These outcomes are organised around three strategies — object and its use; situation and its record; story and its act of telling. Methodically, the exposition (and henceforth the whole research) uses poetic and prosaic language to address people as individual selves and poetically suggest what if we perform the multividual, rather than uphold the individual. This approach hopes to build affective relation towards the reality of a shared planet (Latour 2018), where all entities are connected and interdependent, with agency emerging from in-between, not from a particular ‘one’. Download Accessible PDF

This is an instructive introduction.

This exposition has a bilateral structure. The first layer consists of three descriptions of Monika; the auto-fictional narrative of her birth in the middle; the description of the research process and methods on the left; and the timeline of the public outcomes on the right. The second layer comprehends selected writings, images, and videos, composed around three primary research strategies — forming the body of Monika from within the research.

The two layers are interlinked. Through either of the narratives — auto-fictional, descriptive or the timeline, you can enter the body of research, unstable and fluid, yet still holding the upper layer together.

Click here to meet Monika.

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