Lenka Morávková

Sound Intervention · Performance · Video Art
2011

PROJECT INFORMATION

My Home / My Torture I is the first chapter of Lenka Morávková’s long-term transmedia series exploring the uneasy relationship between home, intimacy and the environments we cannot fully control.

The work originated during Morávková’s time living in Barcelona, in one of the city’s old Catalan apartments — vast domestic spaces with high ceilings, thin acoustic boundaries and an intense sonic life shared between neighbours.

Arguments behind walls, neighbours playing music, voices, dripping water and other fragments of domestic life continuously travelled through the building. Other people’s intimacy became an involuntary part of the artist’s own. Home — supposedly a place of privacy and retreat — became a porous acoustic territory where the boundaries between private and public, intimacy and intrusion, were constantly being breached.

Morávková began recording these unwanted sounds. What started as frustration gradually became artistic material and, eventually, a form of retaliation: the sounds that had entered her home without invitation were collected, amplified and taken back out into the city.

THE WORK

For a series of guerrilla sound interventions across Barcelona, Morávková transformed herself into an ambiguous, plant-like creature and carried a large PA speaker through the city, loudly broadcasting the domestic recordings collected inside her apartment. The interventions unfolded along her everyday routes and in places that formed part of her daily life.

One intervention took place at Plaça de Catalunya, a central public space associated with street performers and spectacle. Morávková placed the speaker down and stood silently beside it. People began to gather, expecting a show. None came. Instead, they encountered somebody arguing, somebody else’s music, dripping water and fragments of anonymous domestic lives suddenly displaced into one of Barcelona’s busiest public spaces.

The interventions continued through parks, metro stations and trains, and crowded bars, where the recordings collided with the existing sounds of the city. Morávková remained largely passive throughout, deliberately creating disorienting and ambiguous situations that left people uncertain about what they were witnessing and how to respond. The absence of an expected spectacle was part of the intervention itself. The gesture became the performance: taking the unwanted intimacy of others and returning it to the public realm.

Alongside the interventions, Morávková and her videographer created staged sequences inside the apartment where the project originated. Wearing the same costume, the artist appears in absurd situations throughout the domestic space, extending the tension between intimacy, intrusion and displacement into video.

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS

2013 — CRE ART, Pardubice, Czech Republic
2013 — NATURE Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia
2012 — Mostra Sonora i Visual, Barcelona, Spain
2011 — Street for Art, Prague, Czech Republic

CREDITS

Concept, Sound & Performance — Lenka Morávková
Creative Producer — Lenka Morávková
Camera, Post-production & Photography — Damian Pissarra