Fruits of Yearning / Dávid Koronczi

Visuals for Dávid Koronczi’s video installation

„The exhibition by the audiovisual artist and graphic designer Dávid Koronczi is a multimedia work, which in a story of three protagonists – a mother, father and adult son – deals with the theme of fatherhood, our relationship to the land, the loss of roots and their re-establishment. This is set upon a backdrop of internal migration, gentrification of suburban satellites of the big city and the surrounding agricultural landscape.
The film in the video installation narrates the tale of a young man recent bereaved by the death of his father. Though he had not seen his father for many years, he decides to hold a wake for him. This decision is in conflict with the attitude of his mother, who, having endured a traumatic and toxic relationship with the young man’s father, is now at pains to erase him from her own life. The basic building block of the entire installation consists of Euro containers which the author obtained from a logistics firm. Their journey from a corporate haulage centre to a tranquil family garden mirrors the narrative of the story’s main protagonist. “If you can’t even put down your own roots, how the hell are you going to cultivate someone else?” stands upon an object produced from materials left over following the reconstruction of the artist’s house close to his hometown in central Slovakia, where the film was made and where he recently moved together with his family. Koronczi’s work, influenced by his own experience of fatherhood, deals not only with the need to seek out a positive masculine role model, but also evokes a desire for a relationship with the land, which he is attempting to reframe as a fatherland (otčina) while stripping it of the nationalistic pathos we hear in the venerated Vaterland of the Nazis or the patriotism of the Latin word for fatherland – patria. The yearning for a land is not determined by a sense of belonging to a national identity, but rather by the magnetic forces of proximity to one’s native land. When we speak of land, what we mean is dirt, rotten apples, fermenting plums, roots of plants and trees, millipedes, earthworms, larvae, communities of microorganisms, the decomposing bodies of our ancestors, ash, extending branches.
The film, which is rich in tactile and auditory sensations, full of kneading and cracking, shows us how our own body and mind consciously situate themselves within an ecology of relationships that transcend the binarity of family–friends, human–nonhuman, animate–inanimate. For Koronczi a symbol of understanding of inter-species relationships is bread, which represents a focal point for him throughout the whole of his oeuvre (we may recall for example the DP.OCH projects within the framework of the Oskár Čepan Award in 2019, or the Ventriloquing series of performance evenings). If we reach an awareness that when digesting food we are also consuming the ideological narratives that circulate around it, bread can then represent a kind of desire for a world in which we form an alliance of species of animals and plants, as well as inanimate nature. Bread is thus a part of the family. “