The exhibition Everything Is Falling Apart as Everything Comes Together can be read as a spatial study of the affective regimes of late capitalism, in which therapeutic language, wellness practices, and digital visuality become tools for regulating attention, emotions, and corporeality. Michal Mitro has long worked with formats that oscillate between care and control, relief and productivity, communal sharing and the technological mediation of experience. His installation does not offer therapy in the sense of repair; rather, it maps the conditions under which the need for therapy itself becomes a structural symptom.
Textile objects created through manual yet partially automated tufting enter into dialogue with questions of craft and algorithmic aesthetics. The softness, warmth, and haptic appeal of the tapestries activate the body even before any semantic articulation takes place. Seven tapestries evoke the iconography of tarot cards—not as a tool of divination, but as a visual apparatus that enables engagement with ambiguity, openness, and projective reading. Esoteric references intersect here with post-internet visual language, giving rise to a hybrid symbolic system stripped of stable meanings.
Motifs of mathematical symbols, approximations, and paradoxes articulate the epistemic uncertainty of the present, in which contradictory statements may simultaneously appear true. Emojis, mutated and layered into new affective configurations, function as empty signs circulating within the attention economy. Their infantile visuality masks violent and toxic narratives that inscribe themselves into everyday experience through a veneer of apparent innocence. The self-referentiality of these images refuses hermeneutic closure and resists stable interpretation.
Tactile vibrational platforms shift the installation into the realm of somatic experience. The viewer’s body becomes the medium through which meanings are not read but felt. Exposure to vibrations, sound, and light does not lead to a purifying cathartic moment, but rather to a temporary suspension of interpretative pressure. Here, Mitro proposes a strategy of accepting a fragmented and contradictory reality without the ambition of synthesis. Disintegration and assembly occur in parallel, as a continuous process in which the subject moves between overload and relief, meaning and its failure.
Lýdia Pribišová
Soft and gentle. Hmmmm… it hums, it shimmers. I touch with my toes first. Then I get on all fours, explore the texture of the wool and the hairs sticking out here and there. I touch the carpet, the carpet touches me. It vibrates, it purrs. I lie down and just observe. The body transforms what I see into what I feel. Trembling, as if I perceived image and sound more deeply. I sense the temperature, I smell the scent of the venue. The space touches me.
Everything is falling apart, everything comes together. Puzzling, puzzled. A puzzle is but one large image made of a hundred pieces. Isn’t it beautiful that it fits together, that from those hundred pieces we can built a whole? Or at least clusters of wholes. And let them lie next to each other just like that, as if they were not to belong together.
Hmmm… And what if the opposites attract, repel contain and negate each other all at once? Everything at once, from left and right, like at an intersection in Jakarta city... and you got to go straight ahead, because the cars and motorbikes won’t stop, unless you step right in front of them.
Hmmm… Doesn't it seem like that kind of complexity and layering is everywhere around us? Everywhere, even in emojis! Anyone who gets by with just a happy and sad smiley today is blessed. But if you that's not you and 150 of them prepacked on your phone aren’t enough, there are another 3,800 online. But you know what the killer is? Those 150 can be permuted among themselves… hmmm… avocado shit, crying dollars, a thundercloud in love, brokenhearted... and it all came just moments after brainrot.
What do you get when you combine Nikes and a shark? Nothing, you say? That's not true! You'd get a three-legged shark wearing Nikes. Wow! But what do you do with that? Hmmmm… Well, I’ll just say two words: Tralalero Tralala.
I hum like those carpets do... As I lay down, I dissolve into a universe of sensations.
hmmmmmmmmm (◡ ‿ ◡ .)
Michal Mitro
Michal Mitro is an artist, curator and a researcher working across the field of disciplines and media. Trained in Psychology and Sociology, he focusses on the nuances of everyday life as well as hyperobjects of planetary scale. In his artistic practice, he translates sociological imagination (Ch. W. Mills) into artfully designed sculptural environments that interweave the media of sound, light, and electricity. Topics that he gravitates towards explore relationships between human and more-than-human worlds and the supposed friction between natural and artificial. Mitro proposes narratives both affirming and disturbing in order to shape the images of futures we may like to inhabit. Besides being an active practitioner, Michal curates a program at ssesi (safe space to exploring s- ideas) in Brno, Czechia, co-develops artistic research with Kosmas Phan Dingh (DE/VT) and Mae Lubetkin (FR/US) on vibration as a way of relating to the more-than-human, is a certified electrician working with off-grid solar systems, dedicated kombucha brewer and a father of eight year old Mateo.
www.michalmitro.com
www.instagram.com/michal_mitro_pvsfa
Acknowledgements:
Ľudmila Jankovichová made a fundamental contribution to the creation of the work through her practical assistance and numerous consultations. Thank you <3. I was able to consult the conceptual and aesthetic foundations with Ján Zálešák—many thanks to him as well. The production of the work was also supported by Tufting Europe, which donated me with the tufting gun and canvas as well as provided part of the materials necessary for the creation of the tapestries and carpets with favorable prizes. Many thanks.
