CLOUDS / Handa Gote Research & Development

In this piece the Handa Gote group continues to work with “little histories“, this time turning to one of its own member‘s personal archives.Veronika Švábová sifts through the history of her family seeking both the fateful moments and seeming trivialities that have survived in family members‘ memories to this day, that are the fabric of family community. Clouds is a subjective study of one’s own family, a series of scenes without causal association, not unlike those fragments of past events that make up our own memories.

How did our ancestors influence our own lives? What have they told us and what have they kept secret? What happened in their lives and fates that repeats itself in ours? What mistakes do we make again and again without learning from them, just like they did? Which aspects of our personalities are inherited from them? What information from the past do we carry in the body? And just what will this body look like in twenty years, if it is still here at all? What results of what actions or events do we carry on into our lives? What do we really remember and what is just our imagination? What does family actually mean today? And who still knows how to bake “mraky“?

Handa Gote Research & Development
is an art group which alternates instrumentation of sound installation, non-verbal and dance theatre, live music, visual theatre and technologies. Their work is influenced by minimalism, eastern philosophy and the DO IT YOURSELF movement. It is a mixture of Czech craftsmanship, recycled objects and technologies and inspiration from the Japanese esthetic categories Mono no Aware, Wabi-sabi.