In my work I deal with the topics of utopia, (urban) habitat, personal mythology, fluctuations between the past and the future, and environmental issues.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, utopia lies in the tension between the criticism of the present in the search for solutions in the future made with reference to the past. Utopia is inherently ambivalent, and it is this aspect that I am interested in - the discrepancy between the idealised visions and the reality of human nature and emotions.
Utopia can be a search for an idealized form of architecture and society, childhood memory, the Garden of Paradise, or a New Cosmic Age with a mix of different modern-archaic religious approaches.
The quest to create a paradise on earth has led humanity to develop plans for ideal utopian cities. The ideal city is inhabited by perfect people who have lost their individuality and who are under the constant supervision of the God’s Eye or the eye of the camera. The specifics of a utopian city / state are its delimitation, its boundaries with the surrounding world, or the prohibition of free movement. The totalitarian projects of the twentieth century were an example of an attempt to put utopian ideas into practice but which resulted in dystopia. These unhappy programs were a clear example of how ideas can be distorted under the weight of a particular local situation and more general human weaknesses.
Slovakia is a country that was under the control of a communist regime for more than 40 years. The consequences of the totalitarian socialist project can be seen even today - not only in the physical monuments of abandoned memorials and densely populated panel blocks, but also in the consequence of a society that is suspicious, less tolerant, and inelastic.
The specific spiritual utopia of humanity is an idea of Paradise. It is both the Golden Age of the past, but also the promise of future life after death, eternal hope, the dream of a carefree sanctuary, a place of contentment, a land of luxury and fulfillment. The Garden of Eden is also a reference to ecotopia, a return to (tamed) nature. Judeo-Christian thinking had encouraged the overexploitation of nature by insisting on the superiority of humans over all other forms of life on earth as argued the historian Lynn White in his much-cited essay on the historical roots of the environmental crisis. The contemporary discovery of nature’s perishability follows the modern collapse of western metaphysics. Although potentially liberating this modern discovery simultaneously invites doubt about our societies’ normative frameworks. The significance of environmental issues can now no longer be ignored and the ways in which we approach them will determine our continued survival as a species.
In my work I attempt to capture some of these aspects. The work does not offer an exhaustive description, but instead an ambiguous transfer of references and meanings.