JCHA 2014 – 555 – Postcards
The fourth stop of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award accompanying project 555 took place in Ostrava where Lucia Sceranková, who lives and works in Prague and London, presented her work. She studied in the studio of Vladimír Skrepl at the Academy of Arts in Prague. At present she concentrates on photography, she is interested in the relation of the photographic image to reality, the ability of our visual reflection of reality and possibilities of influencing one another. She takes photos of imaginary sceneries and intentionally created or found situations. She transforms reality manually, without digital interventions. She is interested in working with illusion and the influence of subtle manipulation on the further function of image and its association potential.
The new project which Lucia Sceranková introduced in Ostrava is entitled Postcards and took place in the tower of the New Townhall in Prokešovo náměstí. It is a paraphrase of the French theorist Roland Barthes – the photograph is not a frame but a hideaway. The installation returned to the play with the fundamentals of technical depiction and the principle of photographs. Common objects have changed into optical apparatuses. Visitors were thus encountered with live models of views.
In the evening the programme continued in the Minicinema in Kostelní street, where Lucia Sceranková prepared a presentation of her work called The Sun in the Showcase and other things.
- My relationship to Ostrava has so far been limited to my passing through by train,00:00:25.455
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- so I have actually never been here.00:00:29.588
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- I was looking at even the most basic tourist websites,00:00:33.862
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- and then I came here to see the city, I was in Vítkovice.00:00:38.044
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- I was looking at it like someone who is new here,00:00:42.303
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- and almost like a tourist.00:00:48.950
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- I like the architecture of the city very much, especially the tower, as an object.00:00:56.325
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- The first idea was to create camera obscura inside the building,00:01:01.206
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- so the view, you would normally come to see from up here,00:01:05.421
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- would be projected inside the tower.00:01:09.964
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- But, in the end, this wasn't possible due to security reasons.00:01:14.396
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- Then we prepared a project for the space of the outlook,00:01:18.684
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- a variation of the original idea.00:01:22.915
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- There are four items based on that ancient principle of viewing00:01:26.947
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- whereby the outlook appears inside the apparatus.00:01:31.938
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- It seems to me, that it is also in line with my current work00:01:40.520
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- - I deal with photography.00:01:44.751
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- Well, one of my favorite texts is Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes,00:01:50.589
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- where he speaks about film and photography.00:01:54.824
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- In this work, as well, I've been drawing from a paraphrase of his quotation,00:01:58.972
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- where he says that film isn't a frame but a hiding place.00:02:03.176
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- I like transposing this idea to photography, which, for it to be as desired,00:02:07.601
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- it shouldn't be like the frame with a dead impaled butterfly.00:02:11.882
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- And the camera obscura is actually like the hiding place.00:02:16.119
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- The way I did it, was that I have chosen projects,00:02:23.960
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- which were important for the development of my work.00:02:28.268
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- And every project is accompanied by a selection of videos, or samples of movies00:02:32.583
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- that are somehow related to the given period,00:02:36.908
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- or they are important for me, on the whole.00:02:41.184
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- For example, I have there my favorite music video by Liars.00:02:45.048
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- Or some DIY tutorials downloaded from Youtube,00:02:58.135
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- which have influenced my work, as well,00:03:03.254
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- and which I watch quite often.00:03:06.994