David Přílučík's "Is it the flight or the fall what my friend is falling for?" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on July 28th, 2023 as one of 19 AEROPONIC ACTS of WHERE THE MOON IS UP curated by Elisa Giuliani.

Here you will find the documentation of David Přílučík's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by Giulia Crispiani and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

Is it the flight or the fall what my friend is falling for?         

David Přílučík's question: Is it the flight or the fall what my friend is falling for?  

David's introduction:

Maybe they’re the tongues of the air

Lazily expressing cars’ sighs

Maybe they’re lined up on the roof

Vying to perform under a bridge

Grey air-life looping

Yet missing the pure loop...

A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight

And serrated wings against the sky,

Like a glove, a grey glove thrown up at the light,

And falling back.

For the egg itself

is a moon

glowing faintly

in the galaxy of the barn,

safe but for the gloves

ominous thunder,

the first delicate crack

of lightning.

The video is a poetic investigation of the city's biopolitics and its urban wilderness. It monitors the regulation of overgrowth, the choreography of environmental violations, and interspecies solidarity.

Giulia's report: The film “Is it the flight or the fall what my friend is falling for?” begins with a car wash behind a wall, another car pulls in, more man washing cars trucks and vans, with air pressured guns, while a soundscape (music) plays, some third landscape, figure walking slowly in circles. Cinematic image going back. A foot on grass touching a flower, or tapping around it, music goes accordingly to montage. Same figure walking in circles, holding hands behind their back, is actually dancing/performing (shot from above in the same third landscape). Video records shades and architecture. Then moves to an empty square feeding pigeons—mimicking the movement. Music gets hectic, like pigeons moves sped forward. Close up of a hand feeding the bird, and then many of them. Then indoor in an attic, a nest and bird eggs.

Phanuel Antwi I’m stuck on your title. It’s beautiful. It pretends to give options, the “what” becomes the object, is doing so much work. I am stuck in the grammar of the piece, and grammar makes sense of the world. If we nerd out even more, perceptually flight, you’re hovering us over the scene, in between all these frames. The pigeon appears in the car scene, and we wonder is this a pigeon point of view? We experience repeated suspension, as a viewer. All these objects or events they all reproduce something. Violence and intimacy at the same time, and it’s about feelings and state of suspension among them. We have to enter to bear with what we’re seeing. 

Ayesha Hameed I saw this as a dancing video, everything was dancing. Grief and communion with the birds and your performer. The music is doing something unsettling. Is it falling or flying? There’s this sense of possibility that is omnipresent and distant. You don’t answer your question your make it ticker. It’s not a resolution. The human is not human anymore, or still. The idea of suspension is at the level of grammar, in the level of speciality and Tarkovsky temporal suspension in this council housing, the saturation point temporally staying with the scene, going from scene to scene. On a temporal level you put us through this journey.

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi I liked how you created the performance and filmed it without being frontal, the deambulation around the performer, the fact that we never see them in their face. The film is very pedestrian, while the question is about falling or flying. There’s something down to earth, dialoguing with a very unstaged performance —dialecting with the abstraction of the movement. The car washing is the only moment where we are out of the earth, it’s an abstraction that creates the first environment.

I enjoyed the representation of nature, the context you chose it’s interesting, Rem Koolhas definition of junk space, a space for nature to be nature, nor idillic nor special. European contemporary art history related to the pigeon as the middleman (Cattelan and Amalia Ulman), and the representation of the middleman. It is interesting to continue this kind of history of the animal of our contemporary fable.

About David Přílučík

David Přílučík's "The Best of all Possible Worlds" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on July 28th.

Find the overview of all nineteen AEROPONIC ACTS 2023 here: WHERE THE MOON IS UP

David's introduction to ' Is it the flight or the fall what my friend is falling for?' in italiano