Kristína Janačková, an artist from Slovakia, is a resident of the Epic Residencies project at the Tou Centre in Stavanger, Norway, during July. Kristína studies and works at the University of Tuebingen in Germany. Her research focuses on disability studies, especially on the phenomenological embodiment of disability. She has previously worked as a fact-checker and analyst for the Demagog.sk project and currently works as a researcher at the university and community curator at the Museum of Everyday Culture.
Kristína Janačková’s poetry focuses on themes of migration, grief and personal experience with the medical system and the psychiatric institution. She presented her poetry in the German-language anthology “in den ruinen des BER siedeln wir wölfe an” of the Haus für Poesie project. At the University of Tübingen in 2022 she led a creative writing workshop on mourning in times of pandemic, war and climate crisis. In the Prague literary café Fra she presented her poetry written in Slovak in tandem with the poet and prose writer Katarína Kucbelová.
During her residency, Kristína Janačková is working on a series of experimental poems focusing on the themes of psychosis and schizophrenia. The poems are based on diagnostic interviews with standardized questions such as “Do you hear voices?” or “Do you see things that others don’t see?” They move from these questions to lived experience and the experience of symptoms. The poetry project is a counterpoint to the common notion that people with psychosocial disabilities do not have the ability to speak for themselves.
