ARTIST STATEMENT

Sum up the main character of your work, your long-term interests and themes.

Björnsonova is a platform for interdisciplinary artists to experiment, research and study together. She’s also a monstrous fictional character and a project with roots and connections in Belgrade, Berlin, Brussels and Prague. Nik Timková (1986), Zuzana Žabková (1987), Tamara Antonijević (1989) and Tanja Šlijvar (1989) - who gathered for this application, combine their practices to describe the relationship between female bodies and their environments in order to unleash fantasies about how this relationship can change.

Friendship

FUCK

Fake

Failure

Fatal

Fiction

Faint

Fantasy

FUCK

FUCK

Fake

Failure

Frustration

Fragility

Freak

Fear

Feminin

FUCK

Fake

Failure

Fluidity

Feiki

Filosophy:)

Fuj

Fertility

Fuj

Following - Guiding

Falling Together Apart

Fake

Failure

Fuck each others ideas

Fire - Wind - Water - Earth - Spirit

Flirting Ficus

Fuchsia

Futureless Faeries

Furry Belly

Fasting

Flow

Furious

Fast Dreaming

Describe the context of your work – what are your inspirational sources and theoretical starting points, which artists and tendencies do you consider as referential to your work.

Friendship. Bjornsonova was reborn into a teenage girl who is shapeshifting her body continuously. There was a need to reconnect. To heal each other, after a long period of being together only in nets but not present as a complex body that can touch itself. Now she touches herself a lot. She is a prostitute at a parasitical institution (Laure Prouvost, Juno Mac and Molly Smith) She wants to be together and alone (Barthes) with others. She is a pregnant sick magician (Tanja Šljivar, Tamara Antonijevic) conceiving snaked through body with naked tits and very long vertebrae knotting her spines (Anne Juren, Alice Chauchat). She writes sym-poetically (Donna Haraway) and licks salty-sweet pages of sci-fi and fantasy books (Philip Pullman, Octavia Butler) and crawls in smudgy labyrinths (Ursula le Guin). She pies together with others (Marie Chouinard) she lets her jaw fall on the ground (Benoit Lachambre), she puts her pussy on the mirror were audience is watching her doing it (Luciana Achugar). She gossips a lot (Lucia Tkáčová a Aneta Mona Chisa) she fucks the Earth, marry her and she sees nature as her lover and not as her mother (Annie M. Sprinkle). She is somatopolitical dissident (Anna Daučíková) perceiving western history as prosthetic failure cursing non binary queer bodies (P.B. Preciado) She dreams dark and makes common visions in wet environments (Starhawk), she lets levitate the pentagon (Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman) she practice regularly her naive rituals (Per Faxneld). She is collapsing together (Meggie Nelson). She is a healer but she is not a witch because when she was burnt she was screaming I'm not a witch (Silvia Federici). She saves us some day (Ariana Reines). She has a body that eats her body (Cassandra Troyan). She let us grow to inside (Emilie Hache). She is Upside down (Stranger things). She is Emo to the extremo (Zero Two). She waves the space and sinks in spits (Anime Girl Spit). She maps the worlds visiting parallel realities (Lucid dreaming, Dreaming fast). She is disgusting (Jennifer's body) and teenage whore (Baby). She reclaims again the radical necessary joy she feel (Postdance). She loves to invite others to her feasts (SCUM manifesto) (Jennifer's body). She is-with, she fate works and fake heals (Valentina Desideri and Fred Moten).

Try to characterize what makes your work specific, wherein lies its force, what makes it different from the work of artists with similar approaches and themes.

Bjornsonova is a project, a fictional character, a community and a dancing multi-body with roots and connections spread over time, space and art forms. A hybrid-subjectivity, she recycles, multiplies and inverts practices, objects, texts and bodies with every event that takes place in her name. As artists operating under her spell, we have gathered to rehearse and develop practices that work towards many futures through anti-strategies, fate work and fake healing. By refusing transparency and authorship we aim to create our own environment, in which we don’t have to be constantly visible and at work. Bjornsonova’s practice is willingly marginal — it’s a position in which she feels most at home, since it allows her to think backwards, avoid duality and negotiate ideas of ownership, representation and identity.

Bjornsonova is a bewitch. She is an inseparable part of all her units a vice versa. All her parts keep their own integrity and they are capable to operate singularly by constituting the part of the whole. She is a shifting variable immature timeless not yet finished ageless nonadult. She bonds and becomes with. She is a parallel companion, polytemporal - polyspatial twin, symbiotic daemon knottings. She holds the darkness together dynamically. She doesn't abandon, she stays and she adapts. She is inverted Baywatch. She is a Bewith Bitch, she is a Bewitch. She is eye-kissing and caring. She is an Echo in the uncanny valley.

Björnsonova revisits the echoes of ecological and eco-feminist movements, medieval heretics, extatic dancers and junkie healers and reads those practices from the point of view of our hopeless, internet addicted, time and space dispearsed, unstable subjectivities.

What is your work process like? Do you deal with preparation and research? How do you search for your themes? How do you choose the media you work in?

The basic work principle of Björnsonova is fate work, as a notion taken from a conversation between Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney, in which they propose a concept of anti-strategic thinking which sabotages the future: fate work rather than work fate. In order to escape the dominating control of the future, the work fate, fate work’s aim is to refuse the strategic approach, which always implies working towards one clear goal. Fate work doesn’t erase your desire: to stay within it means to remain with all possibilities of the now and trust that you’re already doing it. As such it responds to the dominant model of production in which the only possible way of managing precarity is producing even more. Fate work assumes that what we have in common is the present and that there is an abundance of futures, horizons, possibilities and life and art forms. Following this principle, we try to self-sabotage and invert conditions of work. How to create without exploiting ourselves and others who work with us? How can we use institutions in order to develop stronger communities and not only art collectives? How to make long-term projects, that will expand on the notion of collectivity?

Through practices that are operating within uncertainty and multiplicity, like common visions, common dreaming, fake therapy and fake divination, Björnsonova’s previous works inverse or elaborate their previous versions. The principle of reframing and recycling ‘old’ works, while at the same time adding more content, is one of her main anti-strategies. She keeps disappearing and reappearing, changed, new and old at the same time, constantly building herself up and down. While capitalist market demands from artists to be constantly visible and present and to keep making inventive, personal, singular and individual artworks, Björnsonova aims to paradoxically compete with this hyper-production by creating her own parasitical environment, in which authorship and the presence of authors have very little importance. This also means that all participants are always part of her, even when they can’t take part all the time.

These principles create a series of exciting contradictions: If our collective is never stable, is it a collective? If it’s expanding and never fixing itself, could it also possibly go out of our control? If we’re not visible at the art market, are we artists? How do we operate together, in the invisibility and with(in) the many?  

Alone and Together

What Are You Tell Me You

Tell me what you want… morning, middle of the night

What's the quickest way to turn you on

What can I do when I can do nothing?

I'mma shine forever no matter the weather

Oooooooo

Ooooooooo aaaaaaaaaaa

Aaaaaaaáááááááááaaaaaa

Reik meeeeeee

Reikkkk meee myyyyyy friend

I'mma shine forever no matter the weather

Aaaaaaaáááááááááaaaaaa

aaaaaaáááááááááaaaaaa

Aaaaaaaáááááááááaaaaaa

Ou ou

What is your vision for the future? How do you want to develop your work and continue your previous projects/realizations? What is your long-term goal/dream?

Common Vision

In March 2020, during the first and scary phase of the pandemic, the exhibition room has been exchanged by the virtual room of Zoom. Everything had moved to a different mode of existence during that month. Björnsonova back then started showing themselves online, both on Zoom and Instagram to dance, drive, read, sing and to share that type of life. In that online practice, the space, which the women of Björnsonova seem to have found inside themselves is supposed to nourishe the others. In that particular time, everyone was being told that they are stuck and everyone was feeling that very clearly. But the mothers of Instagram and the witches of the internet have always found ways to make sure that what is left of life is being seen. Europe’s borders were closed at the time. People were facing strict curfews and not only that. The specific legal arrangements that determined where, when and how people were allowed in public space, were made according to the authoritarian taste of each government. Nothing is ever certain when the police takes over the streets to execute laws nobody knows how to apply. The laws were, after all, designed to make us leave space between ourselves and other people, no matter where and when and how we move. And when we could not avoid to get close, the air we breathe was to be filtered through face masks. The epidemiological regulation’s idea is, that nothing will be shared any longer. According to the state, the sharing of forks, air, rooms and lives is dangerous and to be avoided – and in the context of a virus that causes a potentially deadly illness in humans, they are right. But obviously, we will have to keep sharing stuff to stay alive.

When people come together on Zoom to share what is left – voices and stories - Björnosonova’s readings raise questions of distribution: What can we share while this is ongoing, while breathing is politically regulated, while people are attached to their passports even more than usually? What can be shared, nevertheless and where can it be shared?

Björnsonova is facing the horror of the current moment from their hideout in a shared bed, where they play flute and read goodnight stories. On the screen, other beds become visible in Belgrade, Bogota, Berlin and Prague and this is how a giant blanket ford is being built on the internet.

BIOGRAPHY

Björnsonova collective was created on 15th March 2015.
She breathing by :
Zuzana Žabková (1987)
Nik Timková (1986)
Tamara Antonijevic (1989)
Tanja Sljivar (1989)
Lucia Svoboda Mičíková
Lucie Kvočáková
and co-existing by and with:
Laura Eva Meuris
René Alejandro Huari
Fergus Johnson
Pawel Dudus
Eva Priečková
Kata Halmen Bodoki