Pavlína Temcsáková’s performance, taking place at a car service lot where her own dying, immobile car is currently located, is meant to serve as a kind of farewell ritual – a gesture of rooting, of awareness of cooperation between human and machine, and of baptizing the new life of this machine.

Here, the car means more than a mere machine. It is not about humanizing it, but rather about celebrating the embodiment of something whose service opens up possibilities for the human body – possibilities that, without this machine, would remain insurmountable obstacles. For the artist, the performance also opens and closes other obstacles – emotional ones, not inherently connected with transport. Inside the space that this machine, created for transport, provides, emerges a place isolated from its surroundings. A place for screaming, a place for love, a place for anticipation and dread. A place where it is possible to perceive time with all the senses.

Humans created the car as a helper. In late capitalism, the car takes on a grand and ominous meaning in the form of violence. Not that it did not do so before. The car industry is part of the endless extraction from the environment and from workers’ bodies. It is part of the hostile transformation of space, which increasingly adapts to the needs of a comfortable, selfish car-loving culture. Yet it is necessary not to forget that…