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Far from You
memorials to Lida Clementisova
mixed media, dimensions variable
ongoing project, 2009

Lida Clementisova, opera singer and piano player, was the wife of Vladimir Clementis, a Slovak politician and a prominent member of Czechoslovak Communist Party. They married in Bratislava in March 1933 and although they remained childless, they were very happy together. Vladimir became a Communist MP in 1935 and him and Lida moved to Prague. Before the beginning of the World War II, in 1938, they emigrated to Paris. Vlado's criticism of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 contradicted to a politics of Czechoslovak Communist Party in Moscow exile and triggered an intra-party investigation. At the outbreak of World War 2, he was put into prison as a known Communist, and later evacuated to British concentration camp. Lida was following him to England hoping for his early release and trying to make her living under very difficult circumstances. She had serious health problems, no money and almost no friends in London, her only solace being the correspondance with her husband. After his release, Vlado comes to find Lida to London and they decide to spend the war there. Vlado started to work at BBC radio broadcasting speeches calling for all Slovaks to fight against the Nazis. They returned to Czechoslovakia in 1945 and he became Foreign Minister in 1948. In 1950 he was forced to resign amid accused of being a "deviationist." He was then arrested and officially charged for an illegal attempt to cross the state boundaries, later changed for a more serious crime to be a "bourgeois nationalist" and participating in the Trotskyite-Titoite-Zionist conspiracy. Lida was also imprisoned and tortured for 22 months, being unsuccessfully constrained to witness against her husband. All this time she was forced to maintain a censored correspondance with her husband pretending she is free, living with her family. After being physically and psychologically tortured, Vladimir Clementis was convicted and sentenced to death in a show trial. He was permitted a farewell meeting with Lida the day before his execution. The meeting was staged and supervised, she had to play a masquerade, they couldn't talk nor touch each other. He was hanged, on 3 December 1952 without ever knowing that his wife endured violence and imprisonment. His ashes were scattered on a road close to Prague. Lida, received only her husband's two pipes and tobacco and was discharged from a prison the next day. She was relegated and forbidden to appear as public person again, she had to work as an archivist in a Prague library.

In 1963 Vlado Clementis was rehabilitated politically and culturally. Lida published his memoires, manuscripts and their private correspondance. Today he is highly institutionalized and credited a national hero. Lida Clementisova has never get into collective memory/history. She is forgotten and her name is sometimes marginally mentioned in connection with Vladimir Clementis.


The last letters of Lida and Vlado Clementis from "Listy z vazenia" (Letters from Prison), Bratislava: Tatran, 1968.
Lida my one and only and Vlado, my dear! (translated from Slovak to English by Mike Gogulski)

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Memorial to Lida Clementisova #50
introduction to overgrowing monuments
(multiplied and freely distributed drawing, plants)

Memorial to Lida Clementisova #50 is formulated as an appeal for planting creeping plants (Clematis Hybride) around monuments of all kinds so as they grow over them and gradually cover them with flowers. The memorial is a suggestion for occupying existing monuments in order to transform them into blossoming monuments. These overgrown sculptures will thus symbolically become a reminder of Lida Clementisova and also a tribute to all the "nameless" women who lived their lives in their men's shadows.













Memorial to Lida Clementisova #16
make-up scheme as Lida Clementisova in emigration
(digital print, 21x30 cm, endless copies)

Memorial as a scheme for make-up designed after an existing photo-portrait of Lida in emigration. By following the instructions on the scheme, everyone can become a temporary living bust resembling Lida Clementisova. This memorial recalls a situation from Lida's life, when, just before her last meeting with her husband, her incarcerators dressed her and made her up so she would appear as if coming from her home, with her look not showing any traces of the suffering and time spent in jail.









Memorial to Lida Clementisova #1133 ("Lida My One and Only")
(pencil on paper, 30x40 cm, endless copies)

Sheet music resulting from the last Vlado's letter to Lida, translated into Solresol. Solresol is an artificial language devised by Fran�ois Sudre in the 19th century. In Solresol words can be represented in a number of different ways � as musical notes of different pitch, as spoken syllables (do re mi fa sol la si do), with colours, symbols, hand gestures etc. The partiture reflects the importance of music in Lida's life and also the way her singing formed her image in Vlado's memories.



















Monument to Lida Clementisova #10
(video with sound, 1' 14'')

The video presents a group of pupils, each reciting by heart a fragment of the last Vlado's letter to Lida. This memorial deals with memory, with collective remembering and individual forgetting. Thus, it refers to the fact that Lida never registered into the map of collective consciousness, reminiscences of her are fragmentary and they exist only as an appendix to her husband's persona.
The video is performed by students of Evangelical grammar school in Banska Bystrica.





















Monument to Lida Clementisova #32

Monument to Lida Clementisova #32 is a temporary embossed mark in the grass made with a matrix of Lida's single prison cell, in which she spent 22 months of imprisonment
(ratio 1:1, 245 x 395 cm, Chateau Trebesice, Czech rep., 2009)















Far from You: Archive

selection of materials where the name of picture of Lida Clementisova is mentioned