Magdalena Kašparová↓

About the work

Personal Archeology

A website oscillating between an interactive diary, a coming-of-age story, a list of objects, and an e-shop as an imaginary marketplace of memories.

Magdalena Kašparová has long pursued collecting and, employing extensive digitized collections, gradually reveals her personal history, tells stories, and retrospectively evaluates various emotions associated with adolescence.

Work with nostalgia, the current phenomenon of going back to past decades, and media archeology – these resources fuse in Kašparová’s art in a freely accessible website, where its visitors can browse through a number of objects, tags, and memories. They are thus given the opportunity to peek into their personal archives, which can evoke emotions on a scale from disturbing voyeurism to nostalgic identification.

The artist uses media archeology, which she transforms into the so-called personal archeology, and collecting of “herself” results in the origination of a personal myth. The issues of digitization, remediation, archiving and cataloging of media artifacts combine in the form of democratically distributed objects within the website in a way that makes it almost impossible to go over everything. Instead of a narrative time medium with a clearly defined duration, a unique version of the story develops only in the viewer’s receptors.

With this collage-like, interactive jukebox of memories, images and data, Magdalena Kašparová follows on in her Pastiche series, based on Simon Reynolds’ theory of retromania forging that we constantly return nostalgically to past decades and benefit from or, rather, “steal” from them. However, Reynolds describes the state of returning to before the year 2000 (the 1960s–1990s), while Kašparová tries to find her own timeline, recent enough to remember it, but also old enough to relate to it nostalgically. This period is the zero years which she conserves in a personal time capsule.