Corpus Alienum
Artistic intervention “Corpus alienum” reflects on Slovak socialist past and today’s attitude of the society towards it. The key object of the project is the plaster statue of Lenin which comes from the period when the building of Pisztory Palace was a seat of the Lenin’s Museum. Two loudspeakers are installed inside the statue. During the public presentation the figure of Lenin is “brought to life” through the audio collage composed of various sounds of manual work and fragmentary dialogues of two workers.
- Pisztory palace is specific for the historical and political changes00:00:17.466
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- symptomatically being inscribed in it, changes typical for this region,00:00:24.074
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- for instance, there was a seat of Hitler´s embassy during the Slovak State00:00:28.554
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- in Second World War, in 1950´s the museum of V.I. Lenin was established here.00:00:34.831
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- This statue was originally placed in palace interior by the main entrance.00:00:43.622
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- After the year 1989 the statue was removed and stored in the basement.00:00:56.975
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- We retrieved it, placed it on the courtyard and restored it as it was00:01:01.125
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- considerably damaged.00:01:06.843
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- In our project we work on the way the statue is made - it´s the plaster cast00:01:19.692
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- consisting of two parts hollow inside, and we worked with this hollow space,00:01:24.223
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- into which we inserted sound system. We let the horizontal seam bringing00:01:31.402
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- two parts into an assembly on the abdomen to be recognized,00:01:38.207
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- though originally it had been retouched. We let it there as a record00:01:43.387
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- of the surgery that have been done. The title Corpus Alienum00:01:49.376
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- is a medical term, it signifies the extraneous entity stuck in an organism.00:01:54.525
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- We recorded 25 minutes sound composition of the manual labour sounds,00:02:04.719
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- and dialogues of two workers, recording mainly the sounds from mines,00:02:10.507
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- constructions and factories.00:02:16.151
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- Strike here, higher, more to the right...00:02:38.333
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- The composition mainly imitates standard working bustle, but there are00:02:43.815
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- also some musical moments evoking Industrial Music having an abstract overlap.00:03:03.152
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- The composition has its dramaturgy, it isn´t just a random tangle,00:03:12.308
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- we can follow certain logic in it or even a narrative.00:03:19.352
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- The project Corpus Alienum responds to manner in which all the representative00:03:49.198
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- statues of the previous regime were treated after the revolution in 1989,00:03:55.382
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- they were removed or alternatively demolished and even today they are00:04:03.482
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- taken for a dormant thread, for a disturbing alien entity which might be00:04:10.311
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- the source of infection or functional disorder in the organism of society.00:04:16.736
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- We manifested this dormant thread by retrieving the statue and00:04:21.428
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- bringing it back to life with our intervention.00:04:30.551
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- I´ll come tomorrow.00:04:36.723