Confluence

This audiovisual project, created in collaboration with the “Save the Confluence” initiative and an international team of artists (Marie Tučková, Katarina Gryvul, David Přílučík, and the artist duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko), explores the newly established Confluence Protected Landscape Area. The project focuses on the unique ecosystem of the confluence of Morava and Dyje rivers, the largest floodplain forest in Europe. The confluence of rivers is not only a site of fragile natural processes but also a key part of Central Europe’s landscape heritage. The project highlights the tension between stability and transformation in nature and seeks solutions and explores how we might, in today’s world, where natural processes and human activities often collide, develop new ways of coexisting with the landscape. The installation includes a monumental object that reflects the fragility of the constant balancing act between massive and invasive interventions in the environment and slow and patient efforts to restore it. The object, in the form of a simple diagram that translates into space, distinguishes between these two different ways of relating to the landscape—the needs of the map and the needs of the territory. The motifs on the object’s small screen respond to the large-format LED projection and together thematize the tension between infrastructural interventions and the environmental memory of the place. The work was created in collaboration with the European project Co-Vision and will also be exhibited internationally, extending beyond the Signal Festival. Object concept (Selmeci Kocka Jusko): during their gradual acquaintance with the largest floodplain forest in Europe, the disproportion in the modelling of the landscape and its influence on the perception of what is 'wholly natural' versus regulated/controlled became the central theme. The object is a spatial expression of a diagram divided into two parts — 'the needs of the map' (large-scale, short-term human interventions that disrupt or erase landscape functions, e.g. China's Three Gorges Dam, whose mass slowed Earth's rotation) and 'the needs of the territory' (slow natural processes or patient human efforts to restore self-regenerating processes). Its narrowest part — where the two principles meet — signals the fragility of this constant balancing act. Credits: Producer — Signal productions, Martin Pošta (owner and CEO); Curators — Pavel Mrkus and Daniel Burda; Signal Festival production team — Jakub Zeman, Alžběta Krajčíková, Stefan Motika, Barbora Luczy; Object realisation — Selmeci Kocka Jusko; Video concept — Marie Tučková and David Přílučík; Music — Katarina Gryvul; Editing and directing — David Přílučík; Camera — Michal Blecha and David Přílučík; CGI — Denisa Müllerová and Veronika Žilinská.