Zuzana Jírová, Filip Hauer: Roman Road & London DLC

Zuzana Jírová's comic Roman Road and Filip Hauer's expansion of Workers Out of Office: London DLC focus on related issues: the lack of time and space for individual attention and relationships, and for the contradictions of self-care and work in the competitive world of capitalist hegemony. The fiction of migration from the periphery to the centre is mirrored in the collaborative project by the dreams of a better life, which in practice crumble under the pressure of neoliberal ideology, automation, and the climate crisis.

The connecting moment for us is the idea of the possibility of making a living through art, which in its ideal form represents free and meaningful work. It is the moments of speculative fiction, the hope of meaningful activity slipping through our fingers, or the anxieties of social problems hidden in compartments that are about to explode.

Roman road - a perspective on the interpersonal relations fiction from above. Social interactions "under the magnifying glass" which follow Katka - a heroine captured in the cliché of an artistic dream. She follows a muddy path to a dream with no horizon, which still does not disappear, but she can't reach happiness, even though she has already managed to monetize her work in London, and specifically sell some of her paintings. The fictional art collector is creepily characteristic of her obsession with visual art and beauty in general. Zuzana sees the house as a space for her lingering traumas. The distant perspective of the voyeur alienates the characters' expressions. They try to appeal to observers who evaluate their outcomes and the meaning of their lives through how they handle it.

Workers Out of Office: London DLC - is set in a dystopian near future where the welfare state is crumbling, and the job market is slowly collapsing. Central Europe is suffering from drought, the conservative right is gaining power, and a desert is expanding on the border of Bohemia and Austria. The heroine of the game, in a fictitious peripheral town, tries to save money for a trip abroad, texting Zuzana, who has recently returned to London, where she's looking for a new job. The characters address the poor economic situation and discuss ongoing crises such as the drought, violence in London and the collapsing job market. Zuzana wants to make it in the arts, but both must spend most of their time fighting for economic survival in the near future. The crisis, however, also opens a new way of finding one's own ability to take meaningful agency in a crisis world and the question of how to organise themselves in new ways.

Zuzana Jírová (1996) is a visual artist who uses various media in her work, ranging from traditional painting to drawing and digital media. She is working with her tablet, where her expressive positions oscillate between the abstract and the concrete. The outcomes are either abstract digital formations and paintings, or cartoonish records of personal experiences in different environments with interpersonal social interactions.

Filip Hauer (1990) is a visual artist. His PhD research project Allegorithmic Work explores the critical and speculative possibilities of the medium of digital games, xeno-games, game exchange and its ideology.