Lenka Morávková

PROJECT INFORMATION

Fucking at a Distance Is Not Fucking began as both an artistic experiment and a very real test of a possible relationship.

Morávková and Vincent Bartels had met only once before finding themselves living hundreds of kilometres apart — she in Barcelona, he in Northern Germany. As they were preparing to meet again and spend meaningful time together for the first time, they decided to turn the period leading up to that encounter into an experiment: could intimacy, communication and attraction develop through technological mediation before they actually shared physical space?

For three days, their emerging relationship became a performance. Using public webcams, scheduled encounters and digital communication, they attempted to meet each other across two distant physical spaces — testing not only the limits of the technology, but the possibility of the relationship itself.

The project explores the fragile territory between artistic experiment and lived experience, intimacy and surveillance, desire and physical absence. At its core is a deceptively simple question: How far can intimacy exist through technology — and what remains impossible to transmit at a distance?

THE WORK

Over three days, Morávková and Bartels used publicly accessible webcams in Badalona, Catalonia, and Graal-Müritz, Northern Germany, as the medium for a remote performance.

Although they were living on opposite sides of Europe, they discovered a striking visual parallel between their environments: both were living by the sea, and both locations had a pier extending into the water monitored by a public webcam. These almost mirrored coastal settings became the physical stages for their encounters, creating an unexpected visual bridge across the geographical distance between them.

Rather than controlling the cameras themselves, they coordinated specific times and locations and entered the cameras’ fields of view. The resulting footage is marked by glitches, delays, missing information and technological imperfections. Instead of correcting these failures, the work incorporates them into its visual language. The gaps and distortions of the technology mirror the uncertainty, misunderstandings and processes of adaptation taking place between two people attempting to construct intimacy before they had really shared physical space.

The performance becomes a technoromantic gesture — a small act of resistance against technological authority and surveillance. By appropriating public webcams designed to observe anonymous bodies and turning them into a medium for intimate communication, Morávková and Bartels reverse the conventional relationship between observer and observed: rather than simply being watched by technology, they actively use it for personal and emotional expression.

Fucking at a Distance Is Not Fucking thus transforms surveillance infrastructure into a space for intimacy, while questioning how much of love, desire and human connection can be constructed through technology — and what remains stubbornly dependent on physical presence.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

2013 — CRE ART Festival, Pardubice, Czech Republic
2013 — NATURE Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia
2012 — Mostra Sonora i Visual, Barcelona, Spain

CREDITS

Concept, Direction & Creative Production — Lenka Morávková
Performance — Lenka Morávková & Vincent Bartels
Video Editing — Anna Turellols