Šmuggeln
/6
- Šmuggeln
- 2006/2011
- video, color, sound
- 1h, 21min
"Šmuggeln" centers upon interviews with four protagonists of and witnesses to the Czech art world over the past fifty years. All of them experienced the Prague Spring, the Soviet policy of repression, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 along with the opening of the Iron Curtain. And all of these video interviews, held in 2006 by the art scholar Franziska Lesák, address historical and contemporary aspects of transition and transformation in the (post)communist Czech Republic by reconstructing the artistic and intellectual milieu of the country’s capital, Prague, as it has developed since 1968. But the point of these interviews was more than just to provide information, since Denzer’s particular interest here was in reflecting upon each interview’s own conditions, form, structure and method, as well as in integrating these into the overall concept. Of central concern, therefore, were not only the questions and the memories themselves, but also the issues of who was remembering under what conditions, and of how these memories can be articulated. All of these interviews were recorded on location in Prague, in either the workspace or the private quarters of each interview partner, using the recording studio “10m² tragbar. Mobiles Studio” (custom-developed in collaboration with the architecture team heiKE/NZ). This made it possible to portray not only the various spatial settings but also all participating individuals and objects such as the interviewer, interviewee, interpreter, and interpreter booth. Thanks to the clarity provided by such details, Denzer makes it possible to lend this collective oral history a concrete location while at the same time critically examining the function of the interview itself.
Interviewees: Ivan Binar (born in 1942), author and translator; Jiří Gruntorád (born in 1952), publisher and head of the archive “Libri prohibiti”; Věra Jirousová (1944–2011), poet and art historian; Jiří Ševčík (born in 1940), art historian, theorist and curator. The interviews were transcribed for the bilingual publication Na místě / Vor Ort [On Location] (Prague, 2013, German/Czech). C.E.
Interviewees: Ivan Binar (born in 1942), author and translator; Jiří Gruntorád (born in 1952), publisher and head of the archive “Libri prohibiti”; Věra Jirousová (1944–2011), poet and art historian; Jiří Ševčík (born in 1940), art historian, theorist and curator. The interviews were transcribed for the bilingual publication Na místě / Vor Ort [On Location] (Prague, 2013, German/Czech). C.E.