The Melancholy Mad Tenant

2022

HD video, sound, 6”51’
Video, text, editing: Katarína Poliačiková
Sound: Michal Kindernay

(please find the video excerpt via the link below)

In The Melancholy Mad Tenant, I continue exploring the possibility of interweaving large scientific narratives with deeply personal stories.
The initial impulse that triggered the creation of this work was a question I asked my close friend Kata many years back: "Do you also feel such tremendous melancholy when looking at a stranger from a train window, knowing that you’ll never see that person again?" — as well as my friend’s response to it.

For centuries, philosophers connected the planet Saturn with melancholy. NASA's Cassini spacecraft had been cruising around Saturn for 13 years, creating countless images of the planet and its rings. It could seem that after all this time, the celestial body and the machine succumbed to some sort of intimate relationship.

In The Melancholy Mad Tenant, I layered, folded, and scattered two narratives, so different and yet — in a certain way (painfully) close: the “suicide” of NASA's Cassini spacecraft in the rings of Saturn and a personal story of losing my friend, who took her own life the same year.
These stories play out on footage from the NYC subway, acompanied by an enigmatic sound piece composed for the video by the Czech artist Michal Kindernay.

(Installation shots by Radek Brousil)