Natural Cleaners
Natural Cleaners, Kristyna and Marek Milde, 2015, single channel video, 6:50min
Natural Cleaners (2015) is a video documenting performances made in various natural and forest environments. In the project, we engage in the activity of cleaning nature as if it would be a home. This type of work, normally reserved for the realm of domesticity, is here misplaced into nature, involving cleaning trees, stones, grass, and riverbank, while using domestic tools such as brooms brushes mops etc. We are interested in how taking the act of cleaning from its context is reduced to a very basic gesture with an edge of absurdity; but at the same time, it represents the elemental mechanism of claiming and controlling space. Natural Cleaners looks at cleaning as a form of a primeval cultural statement that draws on the premise of a declaration of a space by selecting and eliminating. While culture is built on principles of elimination the cleaning in nature becomes clearly an act of intervention in the environment, a force disturbing the natural progress of things. Ultimately cleaning or removing of traces equals removal of connection to wider context and continuity; a step representing separation, disconnection, and state of artificiality.
