Based on documentary footage taken in Ukraine in Autumn 2022. The content continually surfaces from the fragments of stories told. Absurdity and senseless violence of the war stands in contrast with the inner maturity that has emerged in the persons facing events that were unimaginable for them only a few months before.

01/ Vera Girich. Light falling on Kmytiv Yar Street, Kyiv, 2022

02/ Yevhenii Sakun. Light falling next to Chasiv Yar Memorial, Kyiv, 2022

03/ Andrij, the son of Zoya. Light falling on Vodoprovidna Street, Bucha, autumn 2022

When you enter the Dry Cave, sound of the outside world is muted. You are in an environment with nearly 100% humidity and the image of the forest outside looks like a projection on the wall of the cave. Starting point for the project was the late work of Czechoslovak artist Michal Kern, who was visiting the cave obsessively in the last years of life, creating photograms and sketches of stones found there. He said the time has a different flow in there. On a basis of his enthusiasm for this place I decided to find it 25 years after his death with the intention that the ‘plot’ will start to conceive on its own. Three ‘scapes’ overlap here and my position is that of observer, recorder, manager.  Collaboration with the boy (Simon) is a continuity (I Woke Up In A Valley, 2016). Lesson of the play at the largest pipe organ in Slovakia is a daydream for a boy of his age. Mr. Surin was the initiator and manager for the realization of this instrument. They see each other for the first time only for the purpose of play – „to try how it sounds“

Old women talks about her fatal experience from childhood when she was around 5 years old. Inaccuracy of the memory of the event by her and her sister is dominated by the strong experience conserved within her.

Lucia Papčová’s photographs demand attention. A long and concentrated gazing, where an eventual image surfaces from individual recognisable fragments. That remains always, as it were, intuited, without clear contours. Identification demands time and patience. Also inclining us to slow down is Lucia’s interest in contemplation, i.e. marking a space for observation. 

With a concentrated gaze, ultimately we discern a landscape and its attributes. A snowfield on a rock wall, the shadow of a stony cliff, a spyhole into a cave. The theme, despite its deliberate obscuration (or more precisely hyper-clarification, excessive illumination of the image), is important. The author waits for the appropriate light, lets herself be dazzled, and the camera lens captures a clear shining. The photograph, presented in monochromatic colour, records a place; it is the bringing to presence of a moment that one had to wait for. It is an image for which one had to go wandering, and a proof of a luminous situation that will never again recur. Precisely this interest in what is fleeting, while recording apparently changeless landscape sections (mountain walls, forest, cave etc.) is a defamiliarisation of our mode of gazing. It is a prolongation of concentration to the extent where we begin to become aware of our own presence before the image. The object of observation returns us to the subjective experiencing of our own corporality.

When considering the landscape, the dimension of the picture also has its importance. The format of the photograph evokes an open window, through which we are looking at a landscape, and in viewing we become aware of its material aspect also. Sight slides over the surface, till at last the eye finds an identifying sign that can extract a definable form or phenomenon from the abstract structure.

Precisely composed landscapes appear in the photographic images. They confront us with time, testing our patience for recognition of what we see, and in yet another way besides. The landscape emerges on a plane of permanence, durability, as opposed to human transience. Its formation is a matter of inconceivable time, and its contemporary form is the result of diverse transformations. As the Slovak poet Ivan Laučík wrote: “Important in caves is the water that has flowed through them”. In Lucia’s photographs there are slices of landscape which essentially are what formed them. This result of a long-term “creation” is disturbed by an irruption of light, the photographic medium par excellence. The light does not reveal, but on the contrary, it dazzles, and thus the primary theme of the works becomes the one who is identifying: the subject. Human beings, that is to say, are equally the result of their formative processes and events. They are shaped by the thoughts and actions that have flowed through them.

^* Ivan Laučík: Memories of Michal Kern’s Caves. In: Trblet v oku (Glittering Eye). Bratislava: Fragment 2015, p. 96

text written by : Ján Kráľovič

I asked this man to carve a word from his own thoughts into a tree in blossom.

33 years ago, already the father of two girls, he was placed under arrest in the early morning with no indication of the reason. After being threatened with the death penalty during the hearings, he was finally sentenced as a participant in a murder which was fabricated and publicised in the media by the communist investigators. To this day he has not been able to find justice and clear his name. After fighting for 15 years to reopen the case, he and five other men were once again declared guilty by the judicial system of the Slovak Republic. 

The word carved into the tree remains hidden for the viewers, leaving them with knowledge of its presence somewhere in the land. 

trailer         synopsis

I asked my friend to find, without reading it, a letter from over 30 years ago which he had told me about once, and which had a fateful influence on his life. 

“For me, the saddest thing was that it wasn’t signed.”

After three direct ascents (which were necessary to shoot all the scenes) off the regular path to the summit of a ridge where he works as a forester, he reads the letter again after all this time.

His journey culminates in silent reading of the letter, while his experience remains hermetic for the viewer. The present moment overlaps with the past in an altered context, after an exhausting journey through a space that he knows well.