Art Residency: What are our life energy and time being converted into?
A conscious art creation – interview with Eva Ďurovec
We met with Eva Ďurovec to talk about her works, creative process, and the MeetFactory artists-in-residence program, Czech Republic. Focusing on various important global and personal issues, the artist investigates and explores the modern condition of society, art, and humans.
The residency is a part of the the Other Edges of the World projects supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. The second resident, who was participating in the MeetFactory with Eva, was the Bolivian Glenda Zapata, currently living in Madrid. The Other Edges project was developed by Lucia Kvočáková together with Piotr Sikora and considered the futures of peripheral and central power structures in the post-pandemic era. It renewed the cooperation of independent non-governmental organisations and open a call for 9 artists from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Spain, and Ukraine.
A postcard of the Dancing House to my friend Maroš, who recently gave an excellent lecture about the history and speculation of financial capital behind the original proposals.
Eva’s assemblages of everyday objects such as mattresses, work clothes, or pots, often combined with autodidactic research from the kitchen and the street, explore the interrelationships among environments, the quest for a meaningful existence, and challenge the continuous obstacles presented by social, economic, and ecological crises. Through a captivating conversation and the presentation of her residency photo diary, the artist unveils her creative process and reveals the influences currently shaping her work.
Monika Juskowiak: Your work examines the points where living areas, the realisation of existence, and societal, financial, and ecological emergencies converge, as well as matters concerning corporate dominance and how they influence both humans and our planet. What sparked your interest in these topics, and why do you believe they are significant?
Eva Ďurovec: I think that by taking away basic human needs such as access to nature and its resources, and setting man and nature apart for their commodification, by enslaving us to the work we have to do to fulfil our basic needs, life has become dangerous, and dangerous lives are easier to exploit. We are living in times when more and more lives are exposed to danger. More than ever. Better-paid office and managerial jobs, useless yet tied to debt, are still too complex to automate. The work that will soon be done by artificial intelligence is poorly paid and barely enough for someone to live on.
People employed in food production around the globe are starving. Due to the privileged real estate investors, housing in cities is becoming unaffordable, just like Paulo Pena writes for Investigative Europe: ‘capital gains exemptions, special free-tax guarantees, low rent income taxes, and inheritance incentives are just some of the common privileges granted. Real estate funds in the Eurozone reached €1 trillion last year, up from €350 billion in 2010’. Caring for others is in turn an elaborate system that combines health care earmarked for the wealthy with the cheapest migrant women labour. Humanitarian aid, the crumb, is always part of militarisation budgets and keeps lives on the brink of death. What is our life energy and time being converted into? We have to try to push for alternatives that do not create dangerous lives.
Meeting with residents Krzysztof and Anna, both writers and cultural workers, at the co-op-owned Bistro Strecha,, which also employs people without home and/or after serving a sentence.
A lecture on Czechoslovak experts in the lower-income countries at the Náprstek Museum, e.g. Ghanaian water industry in the 1960s.
MJ: Could you tell us more about your creative process itself? What do you focus most on, and what do you find both important and challenging in the creative process?
ED: This varies from year to year. My school final project, notes in the form of daily writings, was also marked by leaving the improvised shared space in the basement of the house where I co-rented and where I always escaped during my lunch break from work. Thinking about what I should be doing and paying extra rent forced me to eliminate ideas for a voluminous spatial artefact. Spending money at the bar or eating out seemed smarter than renting a studio. I wanted to be outside, ideally with my neighbours and friends. By writing about what I was seeing, the experience of the day, and what was outside and inside, I have been more present.
When our son was born, as part of maintaining some sanity, I began to mark all the work around the newborn, observations, and news from the beginning of the pandemic. The diary served as a kind of intimate guide for my friend Selina, who continued it when her child was born a few months later.
For the last year we have been in the shared space of a neighbour, who was rarely in Berlin then. It saved us because we don’t want to move from our small apartment with cheap rent, but if one of us has to work and the other has to take care of a child, it’s very challenging. I have managed to get scholarships (not to mention the fact that behind every positive result, there are several unsuccessful applications, draining my time and energy), which can just about cover this rent. However, the scholarships generate extra work for a few days or weeks of proving how I have processed and presented the project. Simply, the creative process is limited by possibilities that are in my social class and in our geographical latitudes, nothing more than privileges.
My latest project is an attempt at understanding the past, present, and future along the sketchlines of a timeline limited to 1860-2040. The form of this piece consists of old cooking pots serving as an extension of my personal body that I outlined in the aforementioned journal. One of the problems I’d like to solve here is minimising work, especially on the computer and with the wifi turned off.
A video from the series called ‘Who’s Afraid of Ideology?’ by Marwa Arsanios is presented at the Rudolfinum, and it seeks to provide new thinking about the future and our possibilities for changing it. On the wall is a manifesto:
The land will not be inherited
Land will go to the commons (WAQF) or common property
Land will be handed over for use only
Land will be used exclusively by those who do not own the land themselves
The land will be used only for agricultural purposes
No development will be permitted on the land
The land will be managed by a cooperative of people living in harmony with each other
Agricultural production will be shared equally among all members of the community that provides the land!
Another screening from the cycle ‘Climate and film’ was taking place in Zdena and was organised by RE-SET (the Platform for social-ecological transformation). After the first film night, devoted to the Zapatista Revolution and Autonomous Self-Government, where ‘The Uprising of Dignity’ was shown, I saw a movie ‘Sweet Crude’, during the event ‘The Niger Delta and the judicial murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa: the black conscience of Shell’. Unfortunately, I did not manage to see the next two screenings ‘La Via Campesina – the peasant movement for food sovereignty’ and the last ‘How much can we mine to save the climate: protests against lithium mining’.
MJ:Apart from your past/latest work, is there any new/upcoming topic that you want to explore creatively?
ED: The latest UN warning, according to which in five years the planet may warm by more than 1.5 C with a probability of 66%, makes it difficult to think about the future. Planning seems naive and causes anxiety and stress.
It is the contradiction of today’s free creation, which on the one hand seems meaningless, but on the other is the only opportunity for change. If possible, I would continue with the timeline sketches where I would like to add missed dimensions such as social movements, revolts, and disobedience.
MJ:Your portfolio highlights your skills as a writer. Do you prefer working with problems through words or materialising them through art?
ED: Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it transcription or production of an anti-text. Transcribing helps to maintain a kind of sense of belonging, taking what is happening into account, because I wish I could be more active and present in the current struggles. Writing also helps me learn and self-correct.
The text does not just emerge from some brilliant flow of inspiration of a person who is alone for a while, but from the grind of hard-won concentration that is constantly disrupted by other work, childcare, filling out forms for the state and its institutions, attacks from technology, and one’s own deteriorating body.
It is also given by the relief I receive from my partner in the form of time and finances, which are also conditioned by the violation of his body. On the verge of going mad from this balancing act, I try to produce and create. Skeletal text written in plain English is produced on the periphery of the energy I am given for the day. Handwriting has also provided me with an effective escape from art forms, the excesses of which, especially in big cities, are tedious to comprehend and consume. Transcribing could be straightforward, take less time, and is more economical; on the other hand, it steals more of the reader’s time, but this is not my intention. My non-textual works come out of texts and often contain text because I retell certain stories in them that I can’t retell in any other way at the moment.
MJ:You have currently participated in an artistic residency at MeetFactory. Could you share with us how you became involved in the programme?
ED: I responded to the interesting open call of the KAIR Košice Artist in Residence in Slovakia by email and, as usual, sent somewhere before midnight.
MJ:Can you describe the residency programme? What did you find most enjoyable about it, and what do you think was its most valuable aspect?
ED: It was my first residency. We lived in the centre of Prague for two months in a shared apartment rented by MeetFactory together with another participant, first Krzysztof Gutfrański (PL), and later with Lina Rica (HR). We had the privilege to use a big studio space where we were meeting other residents. I was reimbursed for my living and travel expenses, and partial kindergarten. Our day started quite early, around six in the morning our son was up, trying to get used to the new environment. My partner Marek took him to preschool, where he often worked on the computer in the bistro. It wasn’t until the second month that we were able to work until I went to pick him up, around noon. When I initially decided to move my ongoing project a little further, I soon understood that I wanted to immerse myself a little more in this new place in which I found myself again. I already lived in Prague in the years 2006-2011, when I started my first job here after school as a somewhat incompetent web developer with a good salary for an American corporation that created an online job portal. During this residency, I could say I haven’t produced anything physical. Towards the end of my time at MeetFactory, Alena Brošková, Kateřina Pencová, and Piotr, three people taking care of even 36 artists a year, organised a trip for us to the north of Bohemia, known for the expelled German minority, slowly renewed lithium mining, dirtier air, and cheaper labour. We partially swam in Lake Milada, created due to coal mining, and visited Libuše’s neighbourhood house in the Janov residential area of Litvínov, where many Roma families were relocated by real estate companies in an aim to “clean” and create lucrative houses in the centres of cities. That was the trigger that served as a pretext for neo-Nazis in 2008 who gathered here in hundreds from all over the republic to attack the Roma community. Now in Libuše a group of neighbours, activists, and volunteers try to create a space so that it functions autonomously according to the ideas and needs of those who need it and without paternalistic control.
It was possible to get familiar with our works in the Hraničář Gallery, where we had the so-called Open Studios on Tour. I presented a series of notes from the residency with the working title ‘Tourists’. What I saw, who I met, and what we talked about I whispered in a slightly broken voice after the recent extraction of half of a thyroid, into a paper tube used for rolling up carpets. There was always only one listener and he/she/they had to hold the tube themselves to hear this amplified whisper. Notes and comments can also be found under the photos in the attached photo diary from the residency. In the autumn, MeetFactory Gallery is preparing an exhibition in which I shall participate together with other residents of the Other Edges project, curated by Lucia Kvočáková (Slovak Republic/Czech Republic), Piotr Sikora (Czech Republic) and Flóra Gadó (Hungary).
The Ethnographic Museum is around the corner. Anna gave me a tip. The entrance fee is only 80 crowns. There is a small exhibition ‘Phundrado drom / The Open Road’, curated by Petra Hanáková and Emília Rigová, working with the collection of the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno. A miniature painting called ‘Pobedim pogrom’ created in 2000 by Ján Berky (SK) is exhibited there. It is about an event in 1928 when peasants attacked the Roma in a settlement near the village of Pobedim in the western part of today´s Slovakia. Out of twenty victims, six were killed, including a six-year-old child. This horror is generally unknown because it was hushed up, the culprits unpunished: the peasants covered for each other, along with the parish priest and the gendarmes.
With Glenda, Marek, and Jerguš we go to the Hraničář Gallery in Ústí for the so-called children’s opening. The backdrops made of shower curtains resemble a kind of aquarium and the form of a fish. Heads and hands cascade up in the curtains and the authors read a text about work, hierarchy, and exploitation.
Glenda is a Bolivian who decided to move abroad. Leaving Bolivia is not easy, and one needs a lot of money to pay for airfare and cover expenses, at least for the first few months. After 4 years in Madrid she has papers tied to the income, which she has to generate each year or she would lose them again. She lived in a three-room apartment with sometimes 15 people at a time: undocumented women who had to accept any kind of work and treatment. In another apartment, again, the owners housed illegal prostitutes and migrant women. She only understood when they found one of them stabbed. When the police arrived, the owners asked her to hide. She was afraid they would take her away. Glenda, she says, was also just an ‘undocumented Latina’.
‘From considerations that the last large piece of land in the city centre, in the Prague Heritage Reserve, and moreover in an urbanistically exclusive position, would not only serve the profit of the developer but could be used for public construction, nothing came of it. Local demands that at least part of the giant land be used as a park were ignored. All these justified and reasonable reservations had only one result – Zaha turned green. This means that flower pots were added to the facade and the height was reduced by two metres: from forty-four metres to forty-two.’ (see https://a2larm.cz/2020/12/vyjednavani-o-podobe-prazske-masarycky-miliarda-pro-pentu-radsi-rovnou-dve/)
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Overcrowded opening of Hay, Straw, Dump in Galérie Václav Špály dedicated to rethinking ecofeminism and agricultural business.
Banners and after-party at Venus in Švehlovka after the demonstration ‘Hour of Truth’, the protest against the degrading conditions of teaching humanities and social sciences.
Jerusalem Jewish Synagogue. Info board: ‘Porcupine’ (‘Dikobraz’) magazine from 1952 with a caricature of Rudolf Slánsky and the process of Jews – cosmopolitans, produced a new wave of antisemitism in Czechoslovakia.
A last photo with Glenda before her leave back to Madrid, taken in our shared flat together with Lina and Jerguš
During my time there a new giant exhibition space called the Mausoleum was opened just opposite our residency studio, in which the founder of the MeetFactory, David Černý, presents his lifelong work. A shocked Lina shows me the price categories listed on the ticket portal. While the regular entrance fee is 250 CZK, art school students must pay 300 CZK, and left-oriented students should pay double, 500 CZK. We don’t know if we should leave the residence at this moment.
A trained rehabilitation worker who is having difficulty rebuilding her clientele after covid measures gives Marek counselling, rehabilitation, and cupping therapy treatment since his back and arms are too stiff after an all-day cramp at the computer work.
The exhibition ‘Domesticated Abyss’ at the Display Gallery continues the contextualization of the violence of the people and shows four audiovisual works from the period of the war in Yugoslavia. It doesn’t just end with a trivial rejection of violence but also shows the situation after the war or opens up gender-related
issues. One video is dedicated to Serbian DJ Srdan Golubovic, aka DJ Max, who has only recently been re-discovered, and Rolling Stone magazine wrote a longer story about it. The unpunished war criminal from the band Tigers, which massacred non-Serbian civilians, has been playing in music festivals and clubs undisturbed.
I met Katy at the Malostranska stop, where we could see the decorations of the Movement for Life demonstrators. We were going to the main train station, where we wanted to catch the Never so expensive winter demonstration organised by the people from Limits Are Us, together with Greenpeace, Fridays for Future, Rainbow Movement, Platform for Social Housing, University for Climate, Tenants’ and Renters’ Initiative, and the band Merbo Trubky. Even in front of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, we could not catch up with them, but we saw their transparents also at Jána Palacha Square, where the demonstration My body, my choice and Prague is feminist! organised by Ciocia Czesia, Abortion Support Alliance Prague, The Safe Space Collective, Budoucnost, and collective SdruŽeny, with about ten other guests was held. When the Pro-Life Movement reached the bridge, some of us moved over and ran to disrupt their march, voicing our disapproval by whistling and shouting. There were a lot of kids in the long march with balloons in national colours holding banners like “My brother has a cool brother”. For queer, feminist, anti-fascist communities and all of us this is a new assault on the hard-won basic human rights – rights that in recent months and years have constantly been exposed to new threats , including the current violence against pregnant people who do not receive medical care. I was rather surprised during the demonstrations, maybe because I would expect it more in Slovakia, by the appearance of four cardinals who spoke to the Pro-Life crowd.
View of Konopišťe Castle and its Orangerie from the Cork pavilion, where the heir to the Austrian throne and owner of the Konopišťe estate, František Ferdinand d’Este, met with the German emperor Wilhelm II shortly before the assassination in Sarajevo.
‘For example, for contemporary Czech feminism, Hussitism provides a point of reference in the form of women warriors, whom the crusaders both marvelled at and feared. Thanks to this reference, contemporary feminism could better anchor itself in Czech society. Feminism, through the reference to the Hussite warrior women, can evolve to be above all a struggle of self-conscious, unprivileged women for a total transformation of a system in which both women and men are exploited. The Hussite women warriors are an example of a possible reference point that can give feminism the direction, energy, and colour that is lacking in liberal feminism, which creates distrust in non-privileged women and men. It would strengthen socialist feminism, which has a universal content and seeks to change the global system of exploitation, and which also refers to reference points in the Czech past.’ (read whole article by Michael Hauser on A2larm.cz
https://a2larm.cz/2020/07/bitva-na-vitkove-jako-inspirace-pro-soucasnou-levici/)
Na Hájku and Na Kotlasce are some of the last preserved First Republic emergency colonies that can be seen on Libeň Hill. The colonists built them between 1938 and 1939 using whatever materials they could find and often as quickly as possible so that they could not be evicted. At present, they are still trying to get a building permit.
View of the landscape after coal mining from the castle Jezeří. ‘Together with Germany’s RWE and Poland’s PGE Křetínský’s conglomerate EPH is one of the three Europe’s largest coal companies, according to data from Ember and Europe Beyond Coal from January 2022, it also has the worst plans for decarbonization among European energy companies. Already at this moment is one of the biggest gas giants, with EPH’s plans to develop gas infrastructure are the most extensive ever in the European Union: we would be struggling to find a corporation that is more threatening to the future of the climate in our region.’ (read more about EPH here: https://re-set.cz/download/2022/EPH_EN.pdf)
Trip around the lake Milada.Visiting the neighbour’s house in Libuše.
Group photo with residents and cultural workers from MeetFactory after a long walk around the lake Milada. From the left: Kateřina Pencová, Alena Brošková, Sonia Verguet, Piotr Sikora, Nicolás Dupont, Darrell Jónsson, Enrique del Castillo, Ilka Theurich, Moritz Liebig.
Performative reading of notes from the residency Other Edges of the World in the Hraničář gallery as part of Open Studios on Tour.
About The Author
Monika Juskowiak
She's a freelance Creative, Art Writer, and Project Manager with a keen interest in exploring the intersection of art, culture, and neuroscience. Holding a BA in Ethnolinguistics, an MA in Visual-mediation communication, and a degree from Wielkopolska School of Photography. She is the founder of Nebula, a neuroaesthetic-coated art and curatorial project.
