Unevenly Reflecting the Surroundings, Over and Over

Kateřina Kuchtová’s graduation work involved an exchange of days. By alternating our perspective, we can see our own limiting habits. Portrait of a Day works with the fact that the one thing we all share, that we all contribute to and should want to influence, is the days that we live – what they look like and what we fill them with.

The relationship between the enormity of one day of eight billion people and the „mundane“ image of what we are all doing this very minute inspired Kuchtová to work with two shapes: a globe suspended in darkness (how planet Earth is usually depicted) and a tokamak – a connection between lived reality and the ideals and structures that shape our reality.

Kuchtová decided to test the place and time that connects us all – i.e., one day – on a smaller scale, meaning between two people. As adults, we are not used to spending an entire day in the presence of someone else – for them to focus on us or us to focus on them. And so this is where she started, spending several days „shadowing“ other people to see whether this experience would alert her to her own habits, whether it would help her to understand people and how to engage in shared things together differently – so that she might be able to depict it visually.

She recorded, drew, and described the days, but the experience of visiting someone else’s day – walking different paths, dealing with different problems than on the day before and after, and participating in different decisions than she would have made on her own – was so unusual that it led her to offer this experience to a new group of people. This group created a living portrait of a day unevenly reflecting its surroundings, over and over. At the exhibition, this portrait is presented in the form of an audio recording.

Kateřina Kuchtová has long been interested in questions relating to spending time, (mis)understandings, and the (im)possibilities of influencing shared rules.