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Uncomfortable Heritage
performance (2005)

Slovakia is a territory with a lack of authentic structures. Its history is marked by frequent changes of regimes (fragment of Habsburg monarchy, satellite of communist Russia, part of Czechoslovakia and today«s New Europe) and lasting dominance of foreign authorities. This instability always nurtured romantic and utopic endeavors to search for national identity, which often led into heroization of folklore. Folk culture served as inspiration, object and formal source for the artistic expression. Rather than being a representation of national identity, the motives taken from popular culture are testimonies of its constant search.
Today, the excessive depicting of folklore in modernist and socialistic realistic art represents a visual fossil and an uncomfortable reminder of an unaccomplished task. The realm of folklore with its potential, visual richness and rules always served as a comfortable refuge, an aim of political escapism. However, from outside, the folklore functions more like a time and space coordinate, like a time-machine to an exotic place, eventually as a footnote on colonization.
The starting point for our performance is a staged situation in which a group of girls dressed in Slovak folk costumes occupies all the available bathrooms of the venue. The performance is usually not announced and for a certain time it remains a latent course of events going on simultaneously with the main programme. After opening the bathroom door the visitors are confronted with the presence of the girls dressed in festive folk dresses (these folk clothes constitute an obsolete system of signs, referring to the wearerÕs territorial belonging, age, social and marital status). The whole situation seems like a frozen moment before a spectacle, like a preparation for a performance. The girls are instructed not to leave the premises of the toilettes under any circumstances and with their persisting presence they create a pretext for visitors' further actions. The performance has no scenario, nor any usual modus operandi, it always invents itself as a consequence of the behaviors of the (voluntary and involuntary) participants and the models of cohabitation they are able to negotiate.

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Negrelli barge, Bratislava-Vienna (June, 2006)









private apartment, Bratislava (September, 2005)













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