During their Magic Carpets residency, Tereza Silon collaborated with queer communities from South Bohemia and Prague, including deaf and hard-of-hearing participants. Through movement-based workshops and somatic imagination, they facilitated creative encounters that enabled individuals to explore and share personal stories – both verbally and non-verbally – and to be witnessed in their beauty. This process culminated in a choreographic and symbolic short film titled Like a Salve (For a Wound), inspired by the material, emotions and ideas generated through these collective sessions.
During a six-week autumn residency organised by Budweis European Capital of Culture 2028, Silon expanded their ongoing artistic practice, which consistently interweaves somatic and movement-based research with locally grounded inquiry, community work, ecological understandings of interpersonal relationships, and poetically oriented textual material. Silon approaches bodies – human and more-than-human – as sensitive, stratified and dynamically transforming entities that continuously respond to their environments while simultaneously co-constituting them. Communities, in this understanding, are open, living and complex social–natural ecosystems whose functioning depends on diversity and multiplicity. Drawing frequent inspiration from plants and various forms of herbalism, this approach also shaped the residency project, which focused on queer and trans individuals, including queer deaf participants. Their involvement significantly enriched the language, expressiveness and formal dimensions of both the process and the resulting work – the choreographic-symbolist film Like a Salve (For a Wound). The film took shape through close collaboration with cinematographer Zaher Jureidini.
Throughout the residency, Silon facilitated a series of movement- and somatically oriented workshops. These were designed inclusively, engaging both participants experienced in performative practice and those encountering performative mapping for the first time. The workshops offered space for sharing personal narratives, analysing embodied memory, reflecting on individual experience, and exploring alternative modes of expression through movement, spoken language and Czech Sign Language. The involvement of queer deaf participants substantially expanded the perceptual and expressive possibilities of the entire process.
Czech Sign Language became not merely a translational tool, but an integrated symbolic and aesthetic layer of the artistic work. It expanded understandings of what language can be, opening a new spatial and motoric dimension of linguistic experience for hearing participants as well. Its visual–gestural nature broadened the ways meaning, embodied relationality and spatial perception could be articulated. Sign language appeared both in interpreted form and as an autonomous expressive medium, entering the choreographic and symbolic structure of the project – including in the film, where the artist’s poem Mother of Pearl is interpreted. The interaction between hearing and deaf queer participants created a distinct communicative environment in which multiple modes of communication complemented, influenced and inspired one another, generating new forms of shared imagination while also acknowledging the structural, institutional and everyday obstacles faced by deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
Silon understands performance as a liminal space that enables the exploration of pre-verbal emotional landscapes as well as multilayered personal histories. In the current global political climate – marked by the rise of fascist tendencies threatening the rights of LGBTQ+ people and other minorities – they emphasise the need for moral orientation and the capacity to performatively embody ambivalence on both collective and individual levels.
Like a Salve (For a Wound) was created after the workshops, drawing on materials and themes that emerged through the participatory process and conversations with local queer and trans communities. The creation of a shared artistic work was understood not only as an end goal, but as a collective project that allowed participants to be seen on screen and to voice – or conceal – their personal narratives through fictionalised characters. The project does not essentialise queer experience, nor does it require queer and trans participants to perform vulnerability in order to secure the audience’s empathy. Characters may remain ambivalent, shifting and deeply humanised, while being allowed to be strange and queer – close to the fairy-tale and magical-realist aesthetics that inspired Silon.
The film’s title invites two primary interpretations. The first relates to the individual healing of wounds caused by normalised cis-heteronormative readings of bodies and the pressure to conform to normative societal structures. The second understands queer existence – and the radical “queering” of worlds and relations – as a potentially restorative principle for both individuals and systems. Here, the wound exceeds the framework of trauma; it is conceived as a threshold space enabling transformation, insight and the emergence of new experience. The wound becomes a passage into new forms of embodied existence, both individual and collective. Subjects often perceived as “wounded” according to cis-heteronormative norms hold up a mirror to society’s own deficiencies and to a bizarre status quo that produces autonomous bodies of knowledge and parallel epistemologies, disrupting assumptions of a universal way of perceiving the world. The wound is also treated as a site from which creativity and resilience may grow. The film opens a space for collective reflection on the origins of strength, care and new aesthetics – just as a pearl forms from an irritating grain of sand.
The theme of language in the film unfolds both literally and symbolically. A tongue from which pearls fall, and which is carefully tended to, refers simultaneously to bodily materiality and to languages and expressive forms suppressed by repressive systems and reclaimed through community practice. These motifs are situated within decontextualised medieval sacred iconography in the gallery space, stripped of the ideological overlays historically used to suppress LGBTQ+ people or to constrain women whose bodily autonomy has been denied under the guise of religious authority. The film positions the sanctity of the human body above clerofascist and other oppressive structures.
Every body is fundamentally miraculous, and the probability of any person being born into a specific context is extraordinarily small – one in trillions. Likewise, the probability of a natural pearl forming is extremely low (1:10,000). In the film, the pearl – historically a medieval symbol of nobility and spiritual wisdom – is reclaimed as a symbol of the uniqueness and value of ordinary human existence. Motifs of water and plant life, recurring throughout Silon’s work, function here as universal symbols of vitality, emotion and collective ecological eros.
The creative process was understood as being equal in importance to the final work. It enabled the formation of a temporary community – a collective bound by a shared dream – offering participants the opportunity to be seen, to create together, and to inhabit a safe space for vulnerability, imagination and play. Emphasis was also placed on the idea that the process itself can hold healing potential, providing room for encounter, reflection, embodied engagement, and for situating oneself within time and society.
Silon’s performative and storytelling-based project introduced a distinctive model of collaboration that connected queer artistic and non-artistic communities, including queer deaf participants. It generated a space grounded not in the reproduction of trauma, but in its transformation into knowledge, care and poetic imagery. The residency demonstrated that even a short-term encounter can open up profound themes and create an environment that supports mutual inspiration, the sharing of experience, and reflection on diversity, sensitivity and shared imagination as essential elements in fostering networks of relationships and collective resilient practice.
Tereza Silon (ona/její, they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer and socially critical bodyworker whose practice weaves together artistic creation and embodied research. Their work explores relationships between humans and nature, the body, ecology and mythology, often through queer and feminist perspectives. They are drawn to moments of intimacy, care and vulnerability, as well as to themes that society may perceive as marginal or dissenting. For Silon, the act of creating together is as essential as the resulting artwork, offering a space for connection, audacity and imagination.
Silon studied Art History and the Archaeology of Africa and Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and completed foundation studies in Clinical Naturopathy in Prague in 2020. Earlier, they attended the United World College of the Adriatic in Italy, an experience that shaped their understanding of conviviality as a gateway to tacit knowledge. Their training in dance, circus arts and performance has consistently unfolded alongside their academic path – ranging from warehouse circus spaces and queer cabaret stages to international biennales. They also facilitate experimental somatic and herbalist practices.
Artist: Tereza Silon
Curator: Alena Kotyza
Text: Alena Kotyza and Tereza Silon
Performers: Elis, Eugene, Geo / Jiří Pavlík, Moiza Abdul, Tereza Silon
Costume Pieces: Justyna Tuchorska
Cinematography: Zaher Jureidini
Lighting: Riyana Lama
Editing: Vojtěch Kunc
Sound Design: HYENAZ
Czech Sign Language Translation: Zuzana Heřmanová and Tereza Holoubková (Tichý Svět)
Photography: Pavel Balek
Project Manager: Anna Davis
Participation and Communities: Lucie Boušková
Production: Iva Jedličková
Special thanks: Alšova Jihočeská Galerie – Wortnerův Dům; Čajový Ateliér; Tady Kreativní Hub; and Mgr. Hynek Látal, Ph.D., for consultations on the medieval art collection.
The film premiered on 16 November 2025, in the presence of the participants, as part of the Community (Un)Conference event in České Budějovice. The project was created as part of a residency in collaboration with Budweis European Capital of Culture 2028 and the European platform Magic Carpets.
Curatorial text by Alena Kotyza