Protocol / concert Ondřej Zajac

How to write the incommunicable?
A record of experience.
How to translate this record into an image?
The house as a closed glade, in which events take place.
What can never be verified will forever be what remains.
Enter and see.
Real history, a never-written event, a blind spot, a blind spot.
A network discourse.

From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin experimented with opium, hashish and mescaline. He recorded his experiences from drug sessions in so-called protocols, which were never published during his lifetime. Protocols offers a unique insight not only into worlds open to the experience of another reality, but also, from a different angle, into sets of concepts with which Benjamin consciously or unconsciously worked in his philosophical work..

Fritz Fränkel, one of Benjamin’s friends, recorded one of the last experiments with drugs on the 22nd of May, 1934. This record not only describes Benjamin’s experience, but also Fränkel’s ensuing reactions. In his book Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, Philip James McFarland discusses how Fränkel’s empirically psychological approach contrasts with the immediate boundless imagination that Benjamin’s verbal descriptions more or less suggestively approach. Fränkel himself experiences the two strongest mental images that appear in Benjamin’s visions that day: the net and the so-called Förster-Haus, the school, the brothel and hell in one, in which the testee is physically contained and in which he mentally meets another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Network discourse. B offers a variation on the seemingly insignificant Hamlet question of to be or not to be: a net or a coat, that’s what’s going on here. He explains that the network represents the night side and everything in being that shakes us. “Trembling is the shadow of the net on the body. In trembling, the body mimics the net, “This explanation was associated with a tremor that engulfed the test subject’s body.”
Fritz Fränkel

The described situation can be understood on several levels. As proof of a unique journey beyond ordinary reality, executed and exactly written down decades before similar experiences became a fashionable way of learning. As an experiment with expanded consciousness and at the same time an exemplary proof of the paradox of the elusiveness of experience, evidence of weakness and at the same time the strength of the human body. And above all, as a unique means of walking in different spaces in spite of time, the eternal journey of a mental idea that has no boundaries and connects the unconnected, as a tool of interpersonal, inter-existential and interplanetary communication. The resulting work is another of the transcripts of Benjamin’s experiences, a secondary reproduction that does not aim to perfectly evoke what has been experienced, but rather to reflect the process of transferring the unseen and its incomprehensibility and the layers that the initial situations bring.

The project was created with the support of Artyčok.TV on the basis of an open call for the creation of a new audiovisual work in 2016 in the student category.