Escape into nature! The politics of melancholy in Czechoslovakian performance art

Adam Czirak explores Czechoslovakian performance artists who set up their studios in nature, making the landscape, a sphere not fully appropriated by society, the preferred site of their artistic practice. Czirak argues that by withdrawing from the everyday world and from concrete political issues, all movements that encourage an escape into nature bear the traces of a politics of melancholia. He questions how melancholic gestures of art production open up a critical dimension through scenographies of disappearance: the oppressed artists find spaces that cannot be censored, places where they are free to become productive and communicate in unusual ways.