Vernissage: Our human time means nothing

Opening of the exhibition Tytus Szabelski-Różniak / Nela Vicanová: Our human time means nothing at Basement Studio. 16 September 2024, Photo: MUO - Zdeněk Sodoma
Czech architect Nela Vicanová and Polish photographer Tytus Szabelský-Różniak opened their exhibition "Our Human Time Means Nothing" in Olomouc's Basement Studio on Monday 16 September 2024. They present monuments that populate the earthly landscape somehow automatically, without discussion. Pipeline routes or abandoned mining towers as products of human dependence on primary resources will be seen in their monumentality as future monsters surviving our human time.

Two projects, one Polish and one Czech, one artistic and one architectural, are united by a common interest, the monumental dimension of human traces in both temporal and spatial dimensions.

Tytus Szabelsky-Różniak documents monuments of two types. The deliberate ones from the times of totalitarianism and pseudo-democracies, and those that somehow unintentionally populate the landscape in the network of communication routes or points of giant logistic centres. The giant linear notch in the surface of the Eurasian continent in the form of the Druzhba pipeline passes by truly monumental buildings of prefabricated halls. The sheer monumentality representing power and capital gives rise to new monuments of our time. A legacy of the future that we did not plan for?

Thanks to Nela Vicanová, we will see our time and its monuments from a different perspective. The human time that we are able to perceive as a time line of everyone’s life is roughly one hundred years. In the context of geological processes, our human time means nothing. But the last hundred years have touched geological time drastically. For the last hundred years we have also been tearing down and erecting new monuments with greater vehemence in the naive belief that we will overcome our own temporality. With the equipment of an architect, the author reveals through probes and axonometric sections the memory of places with terminated mining activity and brings to the surface, in a theoretical construct, the grid that makes geological time visible. We are able to rake it in so that the churches sink tens of meters and lean sideways as a memento. But the destruction of footprints where there are none, or no more worth taking, also acts as a memento.

Will we have time to clear all the ballast? All the unplanned or poorly planned monuments? The architectural and artistic reflection on the themes under consideration is largely dystopian. But we can also read a sympathetic engagement in its code.

This project was created in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland, CULTURE.PL

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

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