Thanks to My Father Who Gave Me This Gucci Face

Through an exploration of language, the project transforms personal memories into a visual and lyrical inquiry into identity, belonging, and the perception of self. Deeply intimate texts unfold alongside pop-cultural references, irony, and self-objectification, intertwined with the memories of growing up in Eastern Slovakia in a family of deaf parents. The work consists of five video essays in which the artist, whose practice is primarily based on text and performance, reveals the vulnerable and ambivalent aspects of everyday life. Set against a childhood shaped by a deaf family and the landscape of an “Eastern European” territory, the work takes the form of a video essay that explores specific modes of storytelling through music video aesthetics. Based on the artist’s personal experience of silence, the work emphasizes the poetic rhythm of editing within its visual imagery. A striking element is Villa Stiassni—a symbol of bourgeois identity and political power—shown alongside footage of the artist’s childhood home, built by her father with his own hands. The contrast turns the luxurious architecture into a stage for a marginalized subject existing between languages, modes of representation, and social norms. “Gucci face” works both as a slogan of identity, symbolizing how value can be purchased through luxury and how the author commodifies herself through her own face card, reflecting the connection between visibility, identity, and social position. Keywords: artistic research, contemporary art, poetry, autotheory, dance, hands dance, street dance, language, sign language, deaf community, storytelling, music video aesthetics, interdisciplinarity, personal narrative, vulnerability, authenticity, postsocialism, Eastern European context, self-objectification, self-ironization, poetics, rhythm, gucci, face card, identity, pop culture, absence, silence, intermedia, video, performance, video essay, video diary, text, spoken word, choreography, autofiction, autoethnography, introspective analysis, intertextuality, documentation, archive, childhood, disability, Rihanna, sign language interpreter, memory, feminist perspectives, motherhood, parents, social norm, affect theory, autobiography, crip theory, care, critical theory, visual politics, identity politics, pop aesthetics, media theory, narratology