"Dont complain about hard times when you find hair in your soup"
This work connects a vocabulary drawn from an aesthetic of The Apocalypse and an aesthetic of Utopia.
For this project we chose pictures characteristic for someone living in the Baroque age - the utopian vision which describes never existing dreams of a new world, with the perpetual presence of beauty, goodness, wisdom and justice-or, in one word, a vision of Paradise and the accompanying ideas of the Last Judgment, Apocalypse or Hell. Beauty and Ugliness, Paradise, and Hell are embodies as the Twins, Utopia and Critic, as a parallel identity for the experiences of someone living today and for a historical person
BAROQUE TESTO is the artistic statement of a collective of authors - Stanislavi Vlčekovej, Daniela Račeka, Tomáša Danielisa, Jána Gonščáka, Kataríny Kovalčíkovej a Zdena Hlinku - a witness to the events of todays society.
BAROQUE TESTO is a meeting between ancient and contemporary art - uncovering the old varnish of human consciousness to find underneath the "process by which the individual strives for power", a positive value for self-realization, but also deforming the individual . . . a bitter sarcastic view of contemporary society - the political scene, a picture from gastronomy - it is hard to eat your virtue when you have an empty stomach
BAROQUE TESTO is a performance about the elite and the process of power. Witnesses of the Baroque, as the authors of the project call it, does not have respect toward authority and the elite of todays social and political life. This comes from the bitter revelation that power is in the hands of barbarian minds and depraved individuals whose only social interest is to grab the biggest part of the social pie for themselves
The sub-title of BAROQUE TESTO is an epitaph for the elite deprived person who will stay here as a message for the future generation - I wanted more and more, but still it was never enough.
For another person this revelation could mean the hyperbolization of the unbearable world, but for the creators of this work, it is the revelation of a passage do the live reality of the Baroque individual - the utopian vision of a non-existent dream world of becoming beauty, goodness, wisdom and justice - in a word, a vision of Paradise..

- Costumes and scenic design - Katarína Kovalčíková - Videoart-visuals Zdeno Hlinka

This Project was made possible thanks to the finacial support of the Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic.