Jakub Jansa at CEAAC

Artist: Jakub Jansa

Exhibition title: Britanica Bootcamp

Venue: CEAAC, Strasbourg, France

Date: September 20 – October 28, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and CEAAC, Strasbourg

CLUB OF OPPORTUNITIES Ep.4: Britanica Bootcamp, text by Kamil Nábělek

Oh yes! We’re here. This is the fourth episode of The Club of Opportunities. We’re in the middle of a story which started a little bit earlier, let’s say in some mythological proto-form and maybe the story is only starting to show itself. We don’t know yet.

The Club of Opportunities began as an introduction to an ontology of one celery root and his own self-being. All this takes place in a semi-natural environment, partly just in our mind. And I can prove this, because I was there. I was actually there, right at the beginning of this story and I was helping this entity be born. There I said, even though it’s a trivial thought – the celery looks like a very common plant, a common vegetable which tends to be overlooked, but inside it’s very very strong. Because the bulb may remind us of a skull.

And there are deeper, mysterious forces hidden inside this skull, which are somehow dissolved and unspecific. So the first episode was mostly about what celery is, and how he came to existence and what we can read from his shape and temperament. We can see his roots which are connected with the ground, and his tiny small roots disappear somewhere in the ground and become almost invisible. There they gain their strength and charge themselves by this proto-energy.

So this is the first moment. This very first episode was mostly just a prologue. But I think the real beginning of this story goes back to Gamu Gallery. There we saw how the celery root entered the world. If we wanna put it simply – It’s the story in which the character of SEER (or Faith) feels anxious in this world . She looks for a way to be more active in forming the surrounding world and herself. So, there we witness the SEER (or the Faith) touching every individual celery root and giving it some positive predictions – or functions.

Here, we can see one of the so called “Celerists” individualizing himself (nebo: Here, we can see one of the so called “Celerists” in the process of individualization). We can see him as a young man, who is presenting a critique of, let’s say, a natural narrative, which is something we consider elementary. By his act of revolt, he finds himself in a teenage phase, he is still looking for his real identity. And now he’s revolting against the origin that gave birth to him. He discovers that this mythology is simply a narrative. Just storytelling. And if he takes control of this storytelling, he’ll be able to steer it in a different direction.

And he realizes that this rhetorical tool is very manipulative. It’s a way to get profits in this competitive fight. So from his safe place, inside the mythos, he enters he enters a battlefield and wrestles on a political level. And somewhere here is the opening of the next episode, but now we’re still not sure what’s going to happen next. But starting with the mythos all the way to the critic and language transformations, we ended up on a political level where the opinions are interfering with each other and fighting. They aren’t looking for a specific transcendental goodness, but rather for a contemporary advantage or disadvantage regardless if it’s fair play or not. Somewhere, there awaits another destiny of our celerist, whom we see here.