U-topic

object, video, installation

Chewing gum Pedro was extremely popular in socialist Czechoslovakia, in the 80s, the period of my childhood, 800 tons were produced annually.

For me, it is one of the symbols of utopia - it is both an inflatable American dream and a sweet taste of socialist promises, which after a while turn into mass without any (nutritional) value.

The series of works, in various meanings and contexts, plays with the form of Pedro's chewing gum as a matter of building utopia. The shape of a thin block with a typical groove becomes a structural block from which the individual residential units and housing estates are assembled.

Deconstructive intervention to a construction foam is a work that uses the mass of construction foam as a symbol of building and insulation of panel blocks, and at the same time strikingly resembles the form of an enlarged Pedro chewing gum. Deconstruction intervention expresses the ambivalence of utopian ideas.

Video Place for a new utopia is a record of grass moving in the wind as a new space for building a utopia. During socialism, housing estates were usually built on open grassland outside the city. Pedro chewing gums placed in the central part of the flat screen express the possibility of the growth of an "inflatable" utopia.

Other work, U-topic is a playful short video depicting the changing fictitious architecture built from Pedro gum. The dynamics of fictitious architecture refers to the construction of panel blocks, which were gray in the days of socialism, emphasizing the material of concrete, but nowadays adopt a flashy color.

Installation U-topic II consists of potatoes on which blocks of Pedro chewing gum are erected. The installation symbolically connects the agrarian tradition of Slovakia with utopian visions of building united peasant cooperatives during socialism, which was related to the violent expropriation of land.