CITY SURFER, PRAGUE (CZ)
Adéla: You use the term “topological imagination”. Do you mean percieving the world in different spatial dimensions? (space, time, capital, the internet…)?
Jozef: It is an awareness of topology as a mathematical field and the ability to apply it on our world-space while being aware that certain configurations might be different. Or to percieve the world as a tangle of intersecting flows, networks and layers which intersect with the physical space and distort it, thus manifesting themselves as other dimensions of space. Something like The Stack of which Benjamin Bratton speaks about – it’s a model of several layers of material and immaterial architectures built upon our world and operating in it and in between it. However, it is misleading to talk about it as immaterial – its infrastructures are built from precious materials, but it surpasses our world in speed of light inside optical cables and wi-fi connection speed.
Adéla: In a recently given lecture on Film Academy of Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague you mentioned “topological model of our world”. Did you mean the visual shape of Earth, or any other set of values?
Jozef: I meant the Earth as a 3D object, which I regard as insufficient thanks to the speed of communication, circulation of capital and logistical networks that capital uses for moving commodity and raw materials around.
Adéla: How do you use geography in your work?
Jozef: I am primarily interested in the map as an abstraction, a model of reality. Which has political implications of course – who created the map, what is it used for, what is inscribed upon it and so on. In my various works, I have approached several aspects of it – like, projecting textures onto a terrain. Secondly, I work with Google Maps satellite footage of atolls from the Pacific, which I deform, cup up and reassemble into new shapes. Then there are the cut-outs of the maps which are exhibited here.
Adéla: How would you explain the name of the exhibition?
Jozef: “Globalist” is a slur used by conspiracy theorists. Either by people like Alex Jones who talk about the New World Order and its minions as opposed to Trumpian nationalism and then it’s used by the Flat Earth believers. Checkmate is from the Checkmate, Atheists meme. It’s a kind of that “topological imagination”, where I am lowkey fascinated how Flat-earthers basically propose a different topological model of Earth, and then of course it’s a provocation, because for me, since earth is interwined with various flows and forces and prodded by a bunch invisible hands, neither of those models are not enough.
