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The Idea and the Goal

 

The project is a multimedia installation exploring rest, sleep, and the lost rituals of soothing. It examines sleep as a form of resistance in a hyperproductive world that has systematically destroyed the conditions for genuine rest, particularly for FLINTA+ navigating patriarchal and capitalist structures that extract labour while denying vulnerability and perpetrating shame.

 

Lullabies for Childhood Gone is a project investigating the body before sleep as a “binding site”: a point where care is meant to attach, where presence or its absence leaves a lasting impact on the body and the psyche. The project is planned to be a multimedia installation (photography with soundscape, and a performance) exploring rest, sleep, and the lost rituals of soothing (lullabies). Through dreamy photography, fragmented sleeptalk (soundscape), Slavic lullabies (soundscape), and a performance of intimate embrace. The "site" here is the body in its most vulnerable state: pre-sleep, suspended between waking and dreaming.

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I question: What shapes of care, neglect, cultural memory, and systemic pressure have already attached themselves so deeply that they surface only in the dark, the mystical, the forgotten, and remembered?

 

The installation is planned to bring together large-format photography, a spatial soundscape of Slavic lullabies and fragmented voice, and a suspended metal sculpture (a reimagined baby mobile scaled to adult grief). A live performance component involving intimate embrace will invite audiences into the work's logic of contact, soothing, and shared vulnerability in an exposed space of 123 Gallery. The public outcome will take the form of an exhibition with a performance evening. 123 Gallery itself will, therefore, become a binding site. A place where bodies, sound, memory, and care temporarily meet and react.

 

Phase and Timeline

The project is currently in active development. The photographic series is largely complete, shot in a visual language that dwells between documentary intimacy and mythological fiction. The conceptual and research framework is established.

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What remains and what the residency would make possible is the production and integration of the installation's remaining components:

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Weeks 1–2
Fieldwork in Prague. Collecting and recording Slavic lullabies, building the soundscape layers together with local artists - from within the culture it references rather than from a distance.

Weeks 3–5
Construction of the central sculptural object (see below) and spatial arrangement of the photographic prints; sound editing and composition.

Week 6–7
Technical installation, spatial testing, and rehearsal of the performance component.

Week 8
Public presentation as part of the group exhibition, including a performance evening.

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Form and Content

The installation brings together three material layers, each corresponding to a notion of the binding the work explores:

 

Photography

​Prints of bodies in states of rest, softness, and mutual holding. Vast landscapes screaming "void" to the audience. The scale (photography either printed in large scale format or implemented in the mobile sculpture) makes the vulnerability impossible to look away from.

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Soundscape

Slavic lullabies, recorded in Berlin and Prague during the residency, layered with fragmented sleeptalk and soundscape created by multiple sound artists. The lullaby is the oldest technology of soothing. Its near-disappearance from current life is a form of collective loss that the work makes "audible".

 

Sculpture

Large-scale baby mobile in metal, suspended from the ceiling. The baby mobile is an object designed to give a baby-body something to fix its gaze on. Recreated at adult scale, it suddenly becomes a monument to the need to be held in place by something gentle, the need to rest without guilt and shame.

 

Live performance component

Choreography of intimate embrace between performers activates the installation during the opening and performance evening. The performance embodies the work's central argument: that care is not only something we receive but something we can practise, enact, and offer to one another even now.

 

Each element is a binding site: photography binds the gaze, sound binds the body through memory, sculpture binds the space, and performance creates live contact. The installation itself attempts to temporarily restore the loss of care & sleep rituals.

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Budget and Key Materials

The material costs would be allocated toward:

• Steel//aluminium sheets & cutting of the mobile sculpture 

• Chromaluxe//plexiglass print of the photography

• Rigging hardware and ceiling suspension system

• Large-format photographic printing (if not printed on chromaluxe/plexi)

• Audio equipment (if not available in-house): small speaker system for spatial sound

• Recording sessions for the lullaby soundscape (the building's sound studio, available on request, would be ideal for this)

• Fee for the performers 

 

Technical support is requested primarily for the structural rigging of the suspended mobile and sound installation. The music studio would be used for collaborating, recording the soundscapes, and lullabies.

Additionally, I have a personal budget that I would love to dedicate to this project.

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