Good Fetishism? (Not Really) by Barbora Lungová

The presentation follows a journey of artistic research within a dissertation project of Barbora Lungová at the Academy of Fine Arts (AFAD) in Bratislava, SK. The question the artist asked herself at the beginning of the journey was that of the possible iterations of queer desire. Gradually, from narrative figurative paintings, the journey led the artist to a conceptual gardening and a building up on her landscape restoration project, part of which is dedicated to queerness and queer community building. The garden and its dominant plant - the barbed garden iris - became a figure through which stories can be resampled, mined and queered. It is reflected both in its material form and in an author’s book.

Chapter VI.

I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII.

During the course of planting the first flower beds in the Rainbow Garden in Kameníky, I also started musing how I might connect the irises and desire on even more levels. Despite the fact that I made conceptual flower beds with irises because they provide the most versatile material thanks to the vast array of variety names, I cast my first sight on irises because I recollected my love for these flowers from earlier years. Initially, when I started expanding the guerilla garden around my studio, I only wanted to collect varieties that I swap with other local gardeners. As I became more curious and started doing research on iris collections, I gradually fell for them and they were becoming an obsession. One can say that the conceptual part of the planting that only developed later was a result of rationalizing and structuring this obsession. However, I was also musing how I can converse with the irises even on more levels, notably on the painterly one. Finally, the idea of a hand-painted book that would be a mix between a plant catalog, a guide through the garden, and a personal diary was born. Portraits of iris varieties would be complemented by maps of the garden beds and by a personal dimension of the queer motivation for the garden as a contrast to the more impersonal composition of the flower beds themselves. I decided that the beauty and fragility of the iris flowers could be complemented by dialogues between my partner and me which don’t necessarily always speak only about our relationship but also about the precarity of traumatized queer existence. The iterations express desire, anxieties, looking for home, belonging, recognition, and queer autonomy. They also speak about my relationship to the garden and how that relationship affects the relationship with my partner Tamara. In a silent nod to the 19th century popular culture phenomenon of “florigraphy,” gave the book the same name in Czech. The English title is Speaking Through Flowers: Or, Intimate Discourse From Lesbian Life and Several Gardens, through Irises. As of now, the book exists in one exemplar whose size and the fact that it must be only inspected while the reader has archivist gloves on lends it the air of a precious, middle-age-like manuscript.

To get to the other parts of this exposition, click on the numbers

Tip

Tip