The Castle That Started It All: The Czech Rupublic

Lightjet C-prints
Collage from found images
5" x 5"
2008

SKAZKA (OR, THE CASTLE THAT STARTED IT ALL)

In an otherwise ordinary town marked prominently on European maps, there stands a massive medieval castle. Visitors appear and disappear regularly, seeking a view of the silent stone structure, a sort of time-capsule after centuries of royal domestication, the rise of Communism, and ensuing decades of public neglect.

Occupying a newly centrifugal existence in the town since the christening of the building as a world heritage site, the tourism it now sustains matches the increasing dependence on its fictionalization, as many local artists are commissioned to render the castle in ever more mythical, increasingly kitsch forms, for those wishing to carry a souvenir of history home.

It was as though a filmic façade had been seductively draped over the buildings in this land
of medieval specters and modern monsters. One could not be sure whether the veil was incarnate,
or circumstantial, for the business of locals or the pleasure of outsiders. Perhaps the grimy patina of history is not lustrous enough to sustain the fantasy of perfect relics.

Renovating, repositioning, and copying the old in order to induce a more authentic history is common in such timeworn places, yet no less strange to stand amidst. We relegate old stones to the sidelines as rubble, or else elevate them as architecture, aiming to convince ourselves there are still places available to our fantasies, even as time attempts to move differently.

That which is named skazka, whether a place, structure, or person, is mythically endowed with eternal existence, like a vampire or a taxidermied creature. Anything advanced toward the future as an artifact remains similarly haunted, a kind of futuristic nostaligia. Skazka could refer also, to architecture which becomes archetypical by way of being disassembled and reassembled in other terrains, displacing and reappropriating the local for a forecasted, outside audience. Like “Potemkin’s Village,” places of skazka are those that have accidentally transformed from the functional to the vestigial, and meanwhile, purposefully been transformed from the local to the legendary.

By designating a specific architecture worthy of museum-ification, the original moves closer to its own extinction. By claiming a story as legend, we claim its historical roots just as we inundate it with supplementary myths. These myths are then transformed, appropriated and disguised to better blend into the places and times they next emerge, chameleons of sorts.