Karolína Vojáčková↓

About the work

Destruction is not a triumph

We live in complex times. While technological advancements keep lurching ahead, other parts of our culture are almost crumbling under our hands. Thanks to the toxic mix of our interests and activities of previous decades, we are now faced not only with the disintegration of values in society, but also of the environment, the state of which has become a direct reflection of our stewardship of our planet. The images we see every day are familiar, creating the illusion and impression of stability of the whole system. In reality, however, we are witnessing destruction that we refuse to acknowledge. Insecurity has become synonymous with the current state of affairs. The world is beginning to take on the appearance of a ruin that has long since moved away from the symbol of the ruins of the Romantic era and is beginning to take on a new shape and life of its own. These ruins outline a new spatial language, an ornament of our time. In this spatial cipher, we read new messages, sometimes explicitly, sometimes covertly. But the ruins live on, on their own. The combination of materials and elements continues to evolve, suggesting a certain growth. New intellectual and spatial parallels offer us interpretations and new moments for future direction.

My aim was to create a certain situation, an environment. I adapted the spatial and lighting conditions to create a certain atmosphere, a memory. The situation I designed uses several objects as cornerstones. These are reminiscent in their regularity of columns or other elements of physical human culture that we often see in photographs of ruins and monumental sites. Their tectonics, however, is strongly disturbed, the changing cross-section is becoming infinitely small, thus implying a sense of uncertainty, of threatened stability. They are a materialized feeling of our times. I have supplemented the materially solid – if shaky – foundation with a volume that suggests continuation, growth, new life. Just as nature transforms ruins in its own image. The textile upper part is already growing in its own different way. It is firmly connected to the base, but it already has a different message. My intention was to point out the uncertainties of our current situation, culture and community as a whole, which is beginning to find itself in an unstable position. At the same time, we cannot see this as a final state, but need to work towards a future development that will be different, shaped more flexibly by current and changing conditions. Although the objects are mute and do not create any dynamic interaction, they have the ambition to recall moments that we know from our history, present and will see in the future. We need to notice their urgency, not through the eyes of a romantic admirer of ruins, but through the eyes of a contemporary person who feels responsible for the development of him/herself and his/her surroundings and is interested in participating in the shaping of the upcoming decades, in a positive but enlightened way, aware of repetition. Even collapses and ruins have their repetitions.