tranzit.cz/

July 1st 2010, 6 p.m.
tranzitdisplay
Dittrichova 9, Prague, CZ

Jiří Skála:
One Family of Objects
Presentation of the new book of Jiří Skála

Special quest: Vladimir 518Every system change requires for its actors to adapt to it. Their new cultural status is defined according to the success of their assimilation which creates interesting social phenomena. In the case of the author of the book One Family of Objects, Jiří Skála, it is the social and economic transformation taking place in the Czech Republic in the past 20 years. The concrete subject in question here is the metamorphosing relationship of a laborer and his machine.

In the year 2005, in the southwestern part of the Czech Republic, a factory where the author had worked at the beginning of the 1990s and where his parents were employed for several decades, went bankrupt. Most of the machines were sold to new owners - small tradesmen or large manufacturing complexes in India and Mexico. The parents of Jiří Skála also bought one of the machines. This unexpected decision gave the author an idea - to search for other machines and have their new owners photograph them.

Allow the owners to capture, through a camera lens, their relationship to their own manufacturing tool, and find out this way why they bought one of those steel giants that possess such specific aesthetics of green paint, ubiquitous grease and pungent smell of steel dust.