In the utopian reality, the system was shut down due to lack of available resources. The world, until that very moment firmly anchored in an economic and social frame with well-defined principles, suddenly faces a situation without the basic requirements for its functioning. The consequences of this new present, in which the concept of property, money,

and even the intimacy of the home have disappeared, are explored by six characters sharing an isolated space of an unclear nature. v eventual situation is played out in the first chapter of the art project by the French-Belgian duo Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard presented at the Kostka Gallery, raising questions that resonate in our present: how will our roles and relationships change when they cease to be defined and controlled by capital? In this way, it allows the audience to catch a glimpse of a fragment of everyday life set against the backdrop of a system collapse in which existing social hierarchies are crumbling, forcing the characters to reassess their position within them.

The persistence within the boundaries of the present and the unwillingness to leave its environment reflect a contemporary world that, as the theorist Boris Groys points out, is only interested in itself. Post-capitalist society places us in a void of terrible solitude that escalates with the loss of previous certainties. Groys’ thinking is reflected in the apparent loneliness of the characters created by Aubrit and Beillard in a space without clear values and boundaries. Their blurring shatters identities and exposes the raw nature of interpersonal and interspecies relationships, where the complex network is extended by animal representatives – weasels. The seemingly static expectation and shifting in the space-time of acting is in fact a source of tension culminating in power games that are verging on manipulation and cruelty. The cancellation of the rules reduces their lives to “bare” – as Giorgio Agamben reflects on them – to existences deprived of rights, including their protection. The characters remain stagnant in a situation, a simple present in which the redefined power dynamics reveal the fragility of human existence. System cracks emerge – yet hidden to the characters, but highly perceptible to others.

Aubrit and Beillard’s exhibition does not provide clear answers to the latently present questions, nor does it provide a key to the unravelling of the story unfolding before the audience. They allow us to enter and glimpse the situation that is being played out, which evokes the film process and its sets, which are not clearly defined as exterior or interior. In the forthcoming film, the set surface is transformed into a more complex thought landscape, the root of the individual parts of the stories taking place in another time, in another place in another exhibition, which can be entered through doors or openings in the walls. However, it is also possible to enter the interior of the set outside the ” shooting “, when the scene is open to the audience’s confrontation and interpretation. Moments of plot breaks reinforce the locking of the narrative in a time loop and are also one of the references to film praxis. The

exhibition presents a kind of film studio, and the story that is composed in it – or just paused between scenes – is reminiscent in its conception of the theatrical typology of the Absurd Drama, the film work of Béla Tarr, Peter Watkins or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, as well as the television formats of reality shows and documentary. Unlike the film industry, however, they approach the concept of movie (cinéma) from a peculiar artistic position and, in the spirit of do-it-yourself, come up with artistically rendered props and methods free from the strictly professional practices associated with the industry. The characters cannot be considered actresses or puppets – the clumsiness of their steps and the rigidity influenced by the way they are materially and technologically constructed make them moving sculptures that think, speak and act. While they do resemble human beings in their features and disguises, the imitation is deliberately imperfect, again making their role less convincing.

The boundaries between reality and utopia, the future and the present, the gallery space and the film set, merge in Aubrit and Beillard’s work much like the emotions of the individual characters. Behind the artistic project, the first Prague chapter of which will be complemented in the coming years by parts taking place in other cities, one can sense a documentary fiction that observes impartially and in its message points to the fragility of social arrangements and (more-than-) human identities.

— Kateřina Pencová, Veronika Soukupová.