David Čumalo↓

About the work

Oblivion

#memory #place #cupboard #hideaway #oblivion

What is your graduation work about?

I usually choose an unusual space as my studio, which serves for work but also becomes its content. Last January, I moved into my grandparents’ home to keep my grandfather company when my granny passed away. I was thus in a place associated with a joyful childhood and adolescence, but now altered by unfortunate circumstances. As with the earlier series, I worked here with a sense of alienation, loneliness, and absence, but now also nostalgia. With the feeling of something very close to me, inextricably linked to me, which is now irretrievably lost.

No one throws away anything here; everything remains in countless cupboards. They overstuff with useless things that thus become equally useless and proceed to the house’s periphery. Gradually, out of curiosity, I began to rubbish through them. Finding various letters, photos, and clothes, especially coats and gloves, forced me to confront my family history. Discovering something new to me, yet old and almost forgotten, seemed to be an intense experience to process. I gradually disassemble the wardrobes into parts, forming a surface for reconstructing them from memory via painting. I like when I break a cabinet only to paint it from memory. No matter how hard I try, no matter that it is still vivid in my memory, and all its parts are in front of me. The reconstruction is incomplete and impossible; something is still missing.

What do you do besides your graduation work?

I love films by Vláčil, books by Gombrowicz, and trips to small towns. Unfortunately, pursuing these activities to the extent I would wish is impossible since I must devote plenty of time to some not-too-funny and poorly-paid contract work.

In what conditions would you like to work on your graduation work?

I would not change a thing; it has always seemed to me that as concerns my working conditions, the worse the better.

What would you imagine to be an alternative culmination of your studies at AVU, in place of the defense of your graduation work?

I would make a big fire in the Academy’s garden to burn everything produced throughout our studies on the last day. It might be a bit dramatic, but what to say – I guess I perhaps like big endings and new beginnings.