Image makers and creative directors Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth share a voice through Crosslucid, researching, questioning and creating new visual universes together using moving images, photography, collage, character design and performance. Through their work, they challenge social norms, and invite discussion around topics such as the synthetic self, digital intimacy, exploring ways of rewiring the relationship between ourselves and our environment.
Q > What’s the most satisfying part of the creative process (and why)?
A > Our projects happen to be very versatile, allowing us to leave our comfort zone, and venture out to explore novel solutions in order to create a symphony of visual elixirs. Our work is driven by a certain level of fearlessness, inviting an element of curiosity and playfulness in our prototyping process, an ever-adapting organism. This very fluid movement of succulent ideas, interventions and perspectives leads us to perpetually questioning the system, and its lack of sustainability and imposing structures we have to deal with as creatives and humans. Finding a navigation through that and uncovering “little fragments of paradise” that often go unnoticed.
During the exhibition in Berlin for the release of our book Landscapes Between Eternities, the scenery and exhibited assemblages constantly morphed and adapted in relation to the spectator, with each other becoming a platform for rapid prototyping of subliminal realities and relationships.
Q > Fast-paced demands — how do these affect your work?
A > It involves a high level of diligent preparation in order to create lucid and conducive environments for ideas to flourish. We see our projects as “aquariums” where accumulated knowledge, visceral intuition, visual input and a string of intermeshed collaborative thought processes, between ourselves and our community, intermingle and supply a rich compost for the subsequent cross-pollination. This process proved very successful during our collaboration with the incredible Nike team in Beijing. We were commissioned to create body sculptures with the selection of brand ambassadors for the launch of their new sneaker range in a very limited amount of time. A challenging but a very rewarding experience that imposed a certain dynamism in impromptu problem-solving.
Q > Tell us about your most unconventional project.
A > One of them is an ongoing project about digital intimacy called #FirstDate, a prelude collection of surreal meditations on some of the impacts of technology and sexuality that we initiated during our artist residency with Propaganda Network and Stamba Hotels in Tbilisi, Georgia. It is a sensitive topic in a faintly erogenous reality that hasn’t fully crystallised yet, where being queer can put you in a life-threatening situation, or where you can find yourself ostracised by your own family. The exploration was rather strenuous but we managed to create a space for mutual exchange and discussion through our panel of talks with activists, lawyers and local women’s groups, as well as a short essay film and a tactile multimedia installation. This wouldn’t have been possible without a network of inspiring collaborators and supportive friends we met on the way. Engaging with the topics of intimacy in digital space enabled us to instigate conversations with individuals and queer community members about their personal traumas that wouldn’t have been possible offline.
We were positively touched by seeing how social networks can have a positive impact and become a safety net for communities, not only through closed Facebook groups, promoting a safe exchange around the topic of sexuality education through implementation of Sarahah but also a way of spreading awareness about sexual health through Grindr channels. We were hoping for continuation of the project in Teheran by creating “objects of desire”, a set of assemblages constructed from everyday objects and found elements. Unfortunately, due to the political situation, it didn’t have the opportunity to unravel.
Currently, we explore new constellations and materialities in our new studio in Berlin, focusing on bringing our new project, “Digital Spiritus”, to life.
Q > Which is more important to you: stillness or movement?
A > It is the subtle dance between progression and reflection, a sweet spot of stimulation and deeper engagement with chosen narratives.
Q > Which areas of study do you find yourself being drawn to?
A > Most of our current reading is around how our understanding of consciousness and the biosphere is reshaping our imaginative possibilities, the emergent futures of AI and our currently explored primal topics of intimacy, sexuality and spirituality in the digital age.
We see a lot of highly positive transitional development in all areas and sciences aided by the unprecedented access to information and interconnection with each other. This pushes us towards a clearer, and highly liberating understanding of our incredibly potent interspecies interconnectedness.
Q > Sharing, connecting, posting. In a world of social media, how is privacy important to you?
A > Ideally it should not be of any importance at all. What poses an issue is losing privacy or having people stripped of their right to it within ideological systems and on a plethora of platforms that exploit this loss, functioning on the old basis of extractionism and profiteering without relevant distribution systems or democratic agency in place.
Q > Dialogue formats — do you actively question the technology tools you use?
A > Absolutely. We reject having the world and its intricacies mediated through a sole easy-access platform and its non-transparent algorithmic rules.
At some point we found ourselves especially cornered in by the available search engines and platforms of idea circulation. It took a while to figure out a bypass to their architecture and we are currently exploring the information realm through library search engines and also Are.na, a truly collaborative platform of idea exchange and sharing. Let’s not also forget the incredible and highly principled existence and communal architecture of Wikipedia; it is dreadful to even imagine this space would not exist in the form it does today.
Q > Opening conversations around taboos — where would you start?
A > In the light of our new possibilities for sharing and exchange, we feel we should certainly start with the two that have been historically used to the highest degree as oppressive measures. They are also some of the most crucial in the human experience — sexuality and spirituality.
Furthermore, what is extremely crucial right now is to liberate the feminine in all its forms from the manifold brutal oppressions it is put up to ideologically and linguistically. Heal the poisonous imbalance once and forever.
This conversation, which took place in Berlin in December 2019, has been edited for concision and clarity.
Sylwana Zybura and Tomas C. Toth first met in London on a fashion job. Their partnership entered a second phase when they moved their base to Berlin in 2017, with the aim to engage in longer term and more complex projects.
