Matej Vakula
MFA Studio for Interrelated Media
matejvakula.blogspot.com
matej.valkula@gmail.com
Artist Statement
If We Don't Have, You Won't Have Either!
For five days a whole square in a city in Czech Republic sunk into darkness. I shut down nice, shiny mast lighting at the "Náměstí Práce" (Square of the Work) in Zlín City, because in the city in Slovakia where I am from, there are the same lights but they have never worked. I decided to embody a "typical" Slovak trajectory of thinking: "If I don't have, my neighbor won't have either!" The main conceptual layer of my intervention comments critically, but also with humor on Czech and Slovak relationship from a point of view of stereotypical Slovak thinking. It is an interrogation into discourse which took place before the division of Czechoslovakia, when both nations were squabbling about each other.
I created this public intervention in cooperation with Museum of fine arts in Zlín, Czech Republic, linking two cities: Zlín in Czech Republic and my home , Žilina City (Slovakia), which prior to the division of Czechoslovakia in 1993, belonged to one country.
If We Don't Have, You Won't Have Either! (map of the area), digital photograph 11" x 17", 2010
If We Don't Have, You Won't Have Either! (lights on), video documentation, dimensions variable, 2010
If We Don't Have, You Won't Have Either! (lights off), video documentation, dimensions variable, 2010