Situation 51
Situation 51 is an actualisation of the well-known text by Bertolt Brecht „Five difficulties in writing the truth“ from the year 1934. The text describing fascism and how to avoid getting influenced by it, offers advice how to handle truth and how to write about it. The text is still up-to-date and represents a deep analysis and encouragement for fighting against hidden forms of fascism in our contemporary society. Zbyněk Baladrán has updated the text visually several times to remind us how acute it is and that we should think it over again.
- I brought a fifteen minute video,00:00:06.179
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- which I don't call video but rather an update.00:00:10.114
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- Once I discovered a text very important for my work.00:00:15.960
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- It's called Five Obstacles to Writing the Truth00:00:25.076
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- and it was written by Brecht in 1934.00:00:28.274
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- He wrote it in an exile and it's a form of pamphlet00:00:31.478
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- he sent to the Nazi Germany as an advice.00:00:37.363
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- He tried to summarize the difficulties00:00:41.234
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- of writing the truth in a complicated atmosphere.00:00:45.156
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- The text simply describes his definition of fascism00:00:52.518
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- and how to react to such situation in the society.00:00:59.497
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- Although the text was written in 1930s and00:01:08.998
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- directly reacts to German fascism and Nazism,00:01:20.710
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- it is still being relevant to the current situation.00:01:24.976
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- Brecht's definition is complex as he identifies00:01:26.710
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- fascism as the last stage of capitalism and imperialism.00:01:33.184
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- Whenever I read the text,00:01:39.199
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- I discover it is still up-to-date.00:01:42.149
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- It is an intellectual refreshment of defining00:01:48.523
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- the truth, how to treat it and how to write about it.00:01:53.201
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- It's aimed at people who write and he mentions writers,00:01:57.200
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- but I guess it has a universal value.00:01:59.882
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- I update the text every few years,00:02:01.720
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- whenever I have an opportunity like today.00:02:05.654
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- I usually come up with some art form00:02:08.573
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- or rather a visual art form to remind it not just to myself00:02:10.910
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- but also to other people.00:02:15.448
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- I've made use of a video many times.00:02:18.256
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- Recently I've made it into an installation00:02:22.696
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- and I used a form coming out from another installation,00:02:26.314
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- it's a slide show of black and white pictures with a short text.00:02:30.202
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- The form also comes out from Brecht and his00:02:35.647
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- reflection on various art methodologies.00:02:38.620
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- After the war he published a book, the only one with pictures he made.00:02:44.155
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- It was an anti-war book where he summarized a common war experience.00:02:50.984
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- It came out in 1946.00:03:01.070
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- In his emigration in Norway, America and other countries,00:03:03.838
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- he would collect photos from various magazines,00:03:07.611
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- he used them in his book and supplemented with00:03:10.085
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- a short text, epigram, poem or just a sentence.00:03:14.453
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- The pictures are black and white and the form is very suggestive.00:03:19.804
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- He didn't consider the pictures as text illustrations or vice versa,00:03:24.896
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- but there is a certain tension I assume to be an anti-thesis.00:03:30.873
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- I was trying to make a similar anti-thesis.00:03:36.473
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- I came across some pictures that would accompany the text,00:03:39.914
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- mostly on the Internet and I kept them in their original quality,00:03:43.477
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- the only change I made was reducing their colour.00:03:46.870
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- I made them all white so that the spectacularity00:03:51.195
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- of their colour didn't stand out too much00:03:55.006
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- and didn't overshadow the text signification.00:03:58.436
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- What to say more...00:04:06.832
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- When choosing the pictures I aimed for00:04:17.811
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- an anti-thesis as I've already said.00:04:22.669
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- I searched for pictures that are not directly connected00:04:26.759
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- with words or sentences extracted from the text.00:04:30.697
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- I tried to search for a certain fundament which00:04:35.327
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- would express exactly the text meaning but00:04:40.103
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- at the same time it brought about an unusual tension or attention00:04:43.334
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- and it supported the sense of the affirmation.00:04:49.937
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- Interesting about the update is that I didn't make it only in Czech.00:04:58.342
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- I participated in various collective exhibitions00:05:05.805
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- where the subject somehow fitted.00:05:09.654
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- For example Dóra Hegyi made an exhibition in Hungary00:05:13.027
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- that could be called anti-fascist as00:05:17.989
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- it directly responded to the political situation there.00:05:20.621
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- So the text is in Hungarian there.00:05:23.755
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- It have it in German, English and other languages.00:05:28.253
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- It has been translated into every language imaginable.00:05:31.346
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- Is the text available on the Internet?00:05:40.499
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- I guess it's not easy to find it on the Internet,00:05:45.360
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- but you can easily get it as it was published many times in the 1960s.00:05:51.264
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- It was translated by Ludvík Kundera00:05:59.520
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- in a book called The Ideas or an anthology The Cherry Thief,00:06:01.548
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- it's been included in many anthologies.00:06:05.464
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- You can get the books in second hand bookshops quite easily.00:06:07.724
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- Thank you.00:06:11.666
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- You are very welcome.00:06:12.882