The relationship of touch to memory is emphasized in the 2018 and 2021 renditions of I Found It Somewhere, but I Cannot Find It. In a former synagogue in Šamorín, Slovakia, the artist stacks ceramic tiles—2,700 in total—and visitors help to tile the floor in a pattern that mirrors the ceiling’s design. As Varga describes the experience, “We look up to remember the fragment of ornament on the ceiling, the geometric pattern, the shapes, the colours of the islands of mortar, the patched holes.” One must recall what’s above in order to pattern what is at one’s feet. In 2021, Varga reproduced, in plasticine, one of six missing columns from a demolished synagogue in Martin. Viewers of the exhibition, following guided discussions of the synagogue’s history, sculpt the column’s relief following their own memories and experiences. The column, throughout the course of the exhibition, is an ever-shifting surface of invented commemorabilia.
In this interview, Varga discusses collective memory, trauma, history as performance, the failure of monuments, and his interest in creating non-monuments—“ephemeral situations that evoke in the audience a feeling of a monument, a statue”—as well as his ongoing projects with libraries.
Varga’s answers were translated into English by Františka Blažková.
—Eva Heisler
I Found It Somewhere, But I Cannot Find It (2021) is an interactive installation that reproduces an architectural column like the two columns found in the ruins of a former synagogue in Martin, Slovakia. The former synagogue was a nineteenth-century building demolished in 1974, and the original columns are now in a private garden in Martin; is this right?
The columns were first rescued during the demolition of the synagogue in 1974. At that time, the rescuers were not so much concerned with preserving the objects as with recycling the material. They wanted to build a summer gazebo out of them. In the end, they didn’t. (The de facto half-hearted vandalism from forty years ago now seems almost a heroic act. I wonder, when is the right time for such a discovery? Now, a hundred years from now, or three thousand years from now?) When the columns were scooped out of the soil with a mobile crane, a hole, an imprint, a negative form remained. The imprint was like a story sandwiched between two stories. When I first read about it in the newspaper, I was most excited about the imprint. By taking out the columns, the imprint was partially crushed. Maybe if the discovery had happened in the future when technology is more sensitive, there wouldn’t have been such a big loss of data.
Accompanied by photographers, the two alloy columns found in that garden were taken from the site to the sunken yard of a building supplies store behind the town. While there was contemplation about what to do next, memory was momentarily in the waiting room, in a non-place and non-time. A few months later and, again, in the presence of photographers, the columns were placed in the garden of the Slovak National Museum. In a great arc, they moved from a private garden to a public one where they lie like lovers, touching one another with their heavy heads. This completed the second rescue (2021).
Your column is made of modelling clay. Placed horizontally on the gallery floor, viewers shape their own imagery into the columns. Were viewers asked to inscribe personal memories or to commemorate historical events?
The ornaments and the relief—the “cover” of the column, which constitutes its topmost layer—are the ideology, the history, the memory, the trauma. I have entrusted the column’s relief to the viewers of the exhibition and to the inhabitants of the city. It has the basic proportions and contours of the original but is otherwise an ever-changing surface. The difference between the original and what is being created in the Turiec Gallery in Martin is the gap between two times, between two presences. It is the image of endlessly multiplying adaptations. How the work evolves and how dynamically the surface changes is mainly in the control of the visitors. But not entirely. The interference with its content happens in a workshop-like way. The modelling is preceded by conversations about the history of the synagogue, the found columns, the site, and the place where the synagogue can still be felt today through its absence. Absorbing the context is a kind of initiation phase of the work. Then follows the modelling, the making, the physical and mental work. The touch and smell of the material—plasticine—reactivate childhood. It awakens the gray matter and motor skills that we have long discarded, polished over with layers of knowledge. After childhood, after playing with plasticine, school came and imposed the truths we learned by rote. But our senses remember times when we didn’t know we knew.
Were participants able to remake or intervene in the works of other participants, or were they only allowed to create in the areas of the column that hadn’t yet been touched?
Spectators’ interventions could be altered, reshaped or even destroyed by other spectators. Even at an art workshop, in seemingly innocent play, injustice happens. In the plasticine relief, after all, the threads of banality, naivety, ignorance, dullness, forgetfulness, inconsistency, distrust, laziness, unkindness and intolerance are also interwoven. Traumatized people (and I suppose this applies to communities as well) are prisoners of their past. They are obsessed with horrors they would like to overcome, and yet they continue to feel and act as if these events never ended. As Peter A. Levine discusses in Trauma and Memory, recent neuroscience research points to a key relationship between memory and bodily manifestations. An experience becomes traumatic when the human organism is overwhelmed and reacts with feelings of helplessness and paralysis. The link between trauma and bodily manifestations also fascinated Sigmund Freud. He concluded that the reason why people repeat their traumas is the inability to fully remember them. The memory is displaced and, therefore, the patients are forced to repeat the displacement as a present experience instead of remembering it as a certain part of the past. What they do not remember, they tend to act out. They do not reproduce it as a memory but as an act, repeating it without, naturally, knowing that they are repeating it. This is their way of remembering—through action, through physical labour.
I am reminded of the distinction often made between figurative monuments that attempt to fix meaning and nonrepresentational monuments in which meaning can slide and which serve as a screen for multiple and more personal meanings. This binary doesn’t hold in your project. The column is a crazy excess of idiosyncratic figurative ornament, and images merge with those of others. Did anything surprise you about the imagery of the participants?
We have questioned figural monuments, and we do not believe in them in critical discourse. Especially in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, there has been a crisis of monuments. The fate of the proud statues was sealed by the regime change. They became tourist attractions. Nevertheless, our cities are still full of statues, proud leaders, history-makers, and others who have no business standing in the squares. (Almost nowhere do we find women leaders, creators, scientists or artists.) Figurative monuments continue to emerge, deaf and blind to their hollowed-out state—static, anachronistic, uncritical, decorative. They represent history resolved, traumas healed, hands cleansed; they are impartial, indulgent to the majority, capitalist, bought, sold, donated, bronze, stone, eternal.
I try to create non-monuments—ephemeral situations that evoke in the audience a feeling of a monument, a statue. I am more interested in what doesn’t exist than in what does. What doesn’t arise, doesn’t get created, doesn’t take root. It is invisible, absent, disappearing. Even the plasticine column from Martin will eventually disappear. The real column is still in the minds of the viewers through the mental trace that is created in the process. This is much more permanent and solid than the plasticine dummy, which will soon disintegrate into a million soft, unworked fragments.
I understand that this 2021 project follows from an earlier 2012 project in which residents of Martin were asked the location of the city’s Holocaust commemorative plaque. Various locations were identified but, in fact, there isn’t a plaque acknowledging the city’s experience of the Holocaust. You then made what appeared to be the traces of a plaque at the various locations identified by the residents as having a plaque. Next, you created rubbings of each plaque’s “remains”. I am fascinated by all the different levels on which this project is operating, both conceptually and materially. Can you share a bit about how this 2012 project came to be, and your experience of making this work?
I first came to Martin when I was invited to create a site-specific work. The town of Martin was an important centre of the Slovak national revival in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are all sorts of national institutions here and the statues in the squares compete for importance. Memory, but also forgetting, are present on every corner. It is difficult to create a work of art in and about a place you do not know. As a tourist, I asked the inhabitants questions and hoped their answers would give me some sort of direction, point me to something. I asked where the memorial plaque to the victims of the Holocaust was located. It was a tricky question as I knew the answer in advance. There has never been a plaque. To this day, there still isn’t one. The locals advised me, sent me to investigate various sites. Often, with the self-confidence of domestic patriots, they unhesitatingly marked the places where the memorial plaque hung. A few locations were repeated multiple times—the library, the church, the cemetery, the literary museum. Collective memory has nooks and crannies that, although they have not been translated into physical reality, we nevertheless automatically consider present. They are like the “homeless objects” of Alexius Meinong’s paradox, meaning those that exist on the outer limits of being, outside of being. They are pure ideal events not actualizable in the state of things, that is, they are not possible forms of meaning.
In the places that the interviewees mentioned over and over again, I physically intervened in the facades of the buildings and, with restorer’s precision, make traces of plaques that had been taken down. In a single day, several traces of torn-down plaques appeared, highlighting or, more precisely, emphasizing their absence. And absence is difficult to remove. Can it be at all? What is disturbing about the traces of the plaques is that we don’t know what they commemorated, who took them down, when, and why.
Libraries and books are approached in interesting ways in many of your projects. In various site-specific installations under the title The Yellow Book, you intervene in libraries. In some cases, you put new covers on books; the paper is transparent, so the original cover is still visible, creating the illusion of a palimpsest.
Frantz Fanon said long ago, in Black Skin, White Masks, that it is not enough to just discover the world, but it is necessary to change it. I believe something similar applies to the library. I look mostly for what is not there. What needs to be added. Changed. Paradoxically, what is missing from the library is what most defines, even reveals, it. It didn’t grow out of the ground like a tree. I have long known that the library was created by dominant forces, by victors. The library, which I have been discovering since childhood, represents the epistemic system of Western civilization, with all the shadows it casts on other systems. For example, the knowledge of ancient cultures, which is passed down from generation to generation orally or visually, is hardly represented at all in our libraries. During The Yellow Book project, in collaboration with the Chiquita Room gallery in Barcelona and curator Agnieszka Killian, we invited artist Kudzanai Chiurai from Zimbabwe to participate in a discussion. Kudzanai Chiurai created the time-lapse work The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, a comprehensive audiovisual archive of the South African liberation movements of the 1970s and 1980s. The absence of such knowledge, not only in our own libraries but also in those of South Africa, is a warning of the continuing colonial dominance of institutionalized knowledge.
The Yellow Book is the most recent and comprehensive artistic materialization of my ideas about the library. In Barcelona, at the Chiquita Room, the Tàpies Foundation, the Arús Library, and the Picasso Museum, I search for and explore repressed, displaced narratives. The work is a performative process, taking place directly in the reading room, which I partially “occupy” and turn into a studio. Viewers and readers also collaborate on the work, for example, by recommending books and stories. I wrap the selected books in transparent covers over which I draw the covers of other books. A relationship, a tension, a critical dialogue is created between the original and the redrawn covers. By overlaying two covers, a third is created. It is a projection of conflict, a provocation. An open invitation to the reader whom the book may reach by chance in the future. The new cover is the missing complement, the materialization of “absence” as such. Both the public and my personal library are subjected to critical reflection. In the library of the Picasso Museum, for example, my lead concern is the questionable collection of Pablo Picasso’s African masks. I point out this problem in an institution where it has not yet been reflected on in any way. Since the 1980s, critical voices alluding to the quality and appearance of this collection have been growing stronger (William Rubin, for example, discusses the problem in depth). Most of the masks came from dealers and were made for European collectors hungry for exoticism. Paradoxically, those exoticizing masks are entrenched in the DNA of modern art, which is still at the heart of our libraries, museums and schools today. At the centre of our knowledge. Admired, sold, bought, celebrated. I am trying to unlearn the stereotypes I learned, romanticized and admired in my childhood and youth. Including Pablo Picasso. Including playing Indians. Unlearning is even more difficult than learning.
In my childhood, I collected and redrew postcards, made bows, arrows and headdresses, watched The Treasure of the Silver Lake with bated breath, mourned the death of Winnetou, memorized the names of Native American tribes, drew imaginary prairies on maps, invented chiefs’ names, wrote a book. These days, I’m returning to childhood play and have been working on In Someone Else’s Skin (“Fremde Haut” in German) at the library of the Goethe Institute in Bratislava. The curator of the site-specific work is writer and publicist Michal Hvorecký. I am creating a new section of Karl May’s novels (set in the U.S. Old West) which reveals a critical look at the tradition of playing Indians in our environment, especially in the context of German literature and culture where “playing Indians” has been deeply rooted since the nineteenth century. As in my childhood, anew, I redraw illustrations from books onto transparent covers. I overlay motifs and try to put them into critical relationships. Play can be an effective ideological-didactic tool. Relatively unopposed by us, it inculcates power schemas, racism, violence.
The new section of the library includes, for example, a second German edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1893 Leatherstocking Tales, with illustrations by Paul Moritz. The cover shows the main character, Natty Bumppo, dressed in an Old Germanic costume, standing next to Native Americans, which is nonsense, historically speaking. The illustration is ideologically tinged, suggesting that the ancient Germanic people are akin to Native Americans, connected to nature, bravely resisting the oppression of the colonizers—the Romans and the British. Next, I address the works of authors who played a significant role in the adaptation of the Wild West into the German but also Eastern European environment: Rudolf Cronau, Karl May, Buffalo Bill, Karl Bodmer, Carl Henckel, George Catlin, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Balduin Möllhausen, etc. Just to follow in the footsteps of Karl May, a bestselling author in Germany, is a great adventure. His books have been period-adapted to a fatal degree and without the author’s awareness. In the 1930s, they were edited according to the National Socialist doctrine and, for example, names that sounded Jewish were dropped from the stories. Even in 1923, In Mekka was published by the Karl-May-Verlag publishing house under the name of Karl May, despite the fact that it was written by someone else in accordance with the needs of the time.
Typically, the function of book covers is to identify subject matter, create expectations or “brand” the book. Can you say more about your redrawing of book covers in libraries?
Covers are the accessory, the exterior, the surface. They are outside the book but, at the same time, they are part of it. They can exist without books, as empty shells. They often save books. For example, during the Second World War, banned Polish books were wrapped in covers of German crime novels and smuggled in at the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany. Unfortunately, the covers were also in thrall to ideologies. Today, covers are a commodity in the service of the market. They have to sell a book in seconds. In crowded bookstores, beautiful covers stare at us from every corner. Is it because people are reading more than in the past? Are they reading books or covers? Different editions of books and their covers reveal a lot about the time in which the books were published. They know more about us than we know about them. Through my interventions in covers, I try, at the very least, to homoeopathically shift the economics and alchemy of the covers.
You made a work in the former rotunda of one of the oldest libraries in Slovakia, in which visitors contributed titles to the spines of books on a wallpaper “library”. This is part of your ongoing project, The Interactive Library. Can you tell us more about this project?
The Interactive Library has been exhibited in a variety of contexts, and while I thought nothing would surprise me here, I was wrong. Other levels and interpretations of the work are emerging. When the library was in the rotunda, it overlaid the room. When it was on the Rue Saint Germain in Paris, it swallowed up the historicizing facade. It is invasive. It spares no space. It occupies. It adopts. It becomes that architecture. Like the advertising banners that create a visual smog on the streets and make it difficult to perceive the architecture and the facades of the houses.
The library is interactive. For me, it stops being a decorative wallpaper and becomes a work of art when people write names on it. Books written, unwritten, read, unread, fictional. Sections, names, dates, references. A temporary monumental cognitive structure emerges, a map, a registry, or rather a non-library of spines, covers, titles. It captures that ephemeral content of the present that is constantly in motion and is lost before it can be written down.
The time and place in which the library is created determine its message. What is decisive is the language, and the geopolitical, but also the institutional, context. It reflects thoughts, desires and anxieties. It is an ephemeral world of signs, a poetic shorthand of reality, an image within an image. It is an unclassified list of knowledge, a sketch of actuality. It appears for a moment and then disappears. It does not yearn for immortality, like other libraries.
A few weeks ago, the Contemporary Art Triennial in Kortrijk, Belgium, where the library is exhibited for a few months, ended. Probably the biggest Interactive Library yet. I didn’t think it would fill up, but it did. It overflowed. Overboiled. Brimmed over. In some places, it was vandalized, trivialized, vulgarized. “Fuck me.” “Fuck you.” Some even tried to wash the names away with water. Organizers considered closing the library early. They didn’t. I find this development of the work relevant as well. What happens normally on the streets, on the facades of houses, is projected onto the library. Knowledge is subject to constant vandalization. Libraries themselves also devalue, oppress, discard, erase, vandalize. Why should it not be the same here?
A 2018 iteration of I Found It Somewhere, But I Cannot Find It, in a former synagogue in Šamorín, consisted of 2,700 ceramic tiles in stacks on the floor. Visitors were asked to help tile the floor such that its pattern mirrored the synagogue’s ceiling. Can you tell us more about this work? In general, what do you see as the role of memory in your work, and how would you distinguish between history and memory?
Let me begin with a quote from Filosofie tělesnosti dějin (The Philosophy of the Physicality of History) by Mirek Vodrážka: “Memory, identity, and the past are related not only to the ideas we recall with the help of words and language but also to our bodies, which we embody with our emotions” (Prague: Hermann & Sons, 2013, p. 15).
I am interested in the impact of “touching” on “remembering”. Memory is transferred not only from mouth to mouth but also from hand to hand. I believe that our immediate physical experience of the environment determines the qualitative aspect of remembering. In this case, the former synagogue is the site of the transmigration of the sentient body, the site of Deleuze’s becoming. Through the body that is the present, we desire to “smuggle” the past into this brief moment. We look up to remember the fragment of ornament on the ceiling, the geometric pattern, the shapes, the colours of the islands of mortar, the patched holes. Then we transfer what we have remembered in a top-down motion. There we try to materialize it by correctly placing and connecting the tiles. Although the assembled image appears at first glance to be a faithful mirror of the ceiling, it is, in fact, full of inaccuracies. It is a picture of the malfunctioning of memory, both individual and collective. It is a deception. A lie. Just like history? Is it a collective lie? We remember what is not in history and we do not remember what is there. History is that institutionalized memory—powdered, staged, perfumed.
