Skazka/Legend: The Czech Republic

SKAZKA/LEGEND:

Living one autumn in a tiny South Bohemian town, amidst a simultaneously flourishing and devastating tourism (and the castle that started it all) brought to mind the sense that my few, hard-earned Czech companions, with sardonic and charming irony, conceived themselves as legendary protagonists within an unfolding play, like iconic lost boys of an old world.

Their scene was cast with chameleons and charmers, as they changed face to please the outsiders and their local community in turn. My companions seemed to inhabit space like revolutionaries and prophets, kicking their boots at the past and racing toward the unknown future with clarity and wonder, haunting the old town as if they fancied themselves the vital cast on a revolving stage, a new breed of pirates.

When I inquired about this dynamic within the town in which we resided, my friend Henri described to me "skazka," a Czech word describing a place no longer for locals but recast for outsiders, like an archaic or archetypical village, disassembled and reassembled on new ground. What intrigued me most was my friend's subtler implication that to feel or experience skazka was to long for something and yet by process of that longing, to cause the subject itself to evade you.

The English translation of ‘skazka’ is ‘legend.’ As legends are stories too vast for any single page, instead recast via many incarnations over many eons, they undergo disguises to better blend into the place and time they next emerge. Like skazka, a legend is a story that is itself chameleon. Skazka is like trying to spin around fast enough to see the back of your head in a single mirror: impossible, and ridiculous, without an additional mirror, an additional gaze, or an additional appropriation.

Places pushed into realms of skazka and legends are places announcing the gaps between experience and representation, a story and it’s storyteller, between truth and fiction. This is the realm in which my concerns as an artist take flight.