Jaro Varga
Komenského 1
2010
4 slide projections, 325 slides, dimension variable
(Living standard, 1971, 29 slides, Inception of the Czech state, 13 slides, The Roman Culture, 18 slides, Title missing, 22 slides, The oldest settlement of Slovakia, Part 3., The Slavonians, 1960, 42 slides, The Communists VI. 1960-1971, 1971, 30 slides, Engineering industry, 1979, 38 slides
The Slovak National Uprising, 1964, 54 slides, The Liberation of Bratislava by the glorious Soviet army, 1959, 53 slides, The historical mission of the working class, 27 slides)
The building of the primary school Komenského 1 in Trebišov in Eastern Slovakia has become an abandoned architecture in the recent years (the school building was sanitized in 2010). Last two years I have been systematically working with this place as a part of my urban explorations. I myself attended the school in the years 1988 – 1996 therefore I do not detach my own personal experiences connected with this place. They are intertwined with a documentation of a current status quo.
After deconstruction and dismantling of all the recyclable materials, interior and exterior equipment only a derelict skeleton was left. The only material that I found in the empty interior was located in the cabinet of humanities. Subsequently I projected few of found transparencies directly on the location. Using an analogue camera I took images of the transparencies again, this time using 35 mm transparency. Thus I created copies with a shift in colour – quasi patina in reference to paint on the walls.
The found slides – nowadays a redundant didactic tool – represent a certain ideology of the institution of the former school which after a forced abort of its period of service has been layered with a particular architecture. The projection in a new space animates the vanishing building, its micro-history, time, space, ideology and institution. Nowadays non-existing address of Komenského 1 is updated in the context of new spatial coordinates.