Curatorial text from the exhibition I Woke Up In a Valley, ArtD. thesis at Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava, 2016

Lucia Papčová (1987) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, completing her study of photography at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Her exhibition project I Woke Up in a Valley is the culmination of her doctoral study at the Bratislava Academy, where she focused on the problems of representing a landscape in a medium of moving image and sound. The project consists of four video installations, where a film image projected into the gallery space intersects with found objects and sound traces.

Although these works, exploring the landscape setting, turn out to have common premises with her series of photographic works, Papčová concentrates more on the aspects of performance and story in the video installations. What makes her approach inimitable is how she welds the duration of performance and fragments of a personal story into the plotlines of individual videos. The video installations are connected by the common motif of a performer – boy, mature man, old man – isolated in the activity of recollection. Although Papčová is working with an authentic story, she does not create narrative-style films. On the contrary, she disturbs the story’s continuity and concentrates on the extreme subjective experience of trauma and its processing. The landscape in which the action is situated is not at all shaped as a backdrop. The artist uses the reverse perspective of the film image: frequently we see the performer from a sharp angle, in a detail shot, or even lost somewhere on the horizon in the distance; on occasion we only hear his voice. The immediacy of the action, the sensitive and at the same time raw manner of recording, compels the viewer to feel his way into the reality being experienced. Steps plunging down to forest land, harsh light refracted in the camera’s object, sudden gusts of wind resounding in the hall of a railway station…

Papčová suppresses the social and political associations of her videos and concentrates on a transformation of reality using the abstraction of landscape. She is orientated more towards object traces, synopses, gaps and speech pauses. The insoluble controversies of personal fates produce tension between the seen and the represented. Participants are deeply marked by the transition of society and its legal system from real socialism to democracy. Hence the seemingly banal scenes make reference to complex social changes which have traumatised many citizens’ lives. The inability to attain fundamental human rights has led them to a renewed effort to accomplish social justice and not come to terms with the given state of affairs. Papčová accordingly presents a reflection on the possibilities of human justice, with answers merely hinted at and left open to further interpretation. Memory is uncovered and simultaneously silenced, between that which can be mediated in language and what the viewer, now entirely reliant on signs, may experience with landscape and in landscape, which swallows up all traces of trauma and transcends to another quality.

The cycle of four separate video installations uses contrasts of static and dynamic camera and is built on the principle of synopses.Spring After 33 Years directs attention to a place in a landscape where an inconspicuous event is occurring, shot from a great distance so that it is swallowed up in the surrounding countryside. A Journey to the Ridge, on the other hand, presents a dramatic climb to the summit right to the moment when memory is confronted with a written document, though the viewer has no access to this and can only guess its content.The Landscape There again draws us, by monotonous depiction, into a narrative about landscape. Gradually we discover that it is a landscape beyond this world. The station hall, scene of the last of the four videos I Woke Up in a Valley,is a place of controversy and physical transition from one reality to another. The landscape here is represented in a complex system of framing, where props from the past are confronted in an image of a landscape which encounters injustice and simultaneously, in the figure of a singing child, indicates faith in the world’s good. In the contemporary art context Lucia Papčová’s cycle of video installations is an exceptional work, because it is based on the hitherto little-used procedures of film narration, subjectivity and the representation of landscape.

Daniel Grúň