text: Piotr Gąska
Trenčín is a city of around sixty thousand inhabitants.On the one hand, it is small; on the other, it is large enough to have its own memory, its own contradictions, its own centre and outskirts, its representative places and those people would rather not talk about.A castle towers over the city, a river runs through its centre, and its historic urban fabric has been preserved. At the same time, contemporary Trenčín is a place of everyday life, change and ambition. It is therefore neither a model of a city nora scaled-down version of one. Perhaps it is precisely this scale that is of interest to the artists associated with Gallery Formaat. For them, Trenčín is neither a backdrop nor a subject in itself. It is a place where something can be seen. Sometimes all it takes is to look more closelyat what seems too familiar to notice anymore.
Merina, once one of the city’s most important factories, is today above all an absence. Its demolished buildings appear in the work of Zovinec Bros as an absurd developer’s trophy. Architecture thathas ceased to exist is rebuilt once again – this time as a monument to the victor. It is a story about Trenčín, but it could just as easily have taken place in Berlin, Warsaw, London or anywhere else where urban development begins to resemble a process of exchanging memory for square metres.
Merina is also present in the work of Nadežda Koyšová, whose exploration of water and the swimming pool began precisely at an art symposium held in this factory.The swimming pool becomes a place of competition, community, tension and individual effort. The sporting struggle is at once very concrete and entirely universal: we try to win against someone, for someone, against someone, and sometimes, above all, against ourselves.
The history of the city told through architecture also appears in the work of Jana Gombiková. ODA – House of the Army Trade Union – monumental late-Communist architecture, designed on a grand scale that no era convinced of its own greatness would have been ashamed of, was intended to serve large institutions. Today, its spaces are occupied by smaller communities, clubs, enthusiasts, veterans, social organisations and people practising yoga. The grand project of history has thus found an unexpected use: it has become a shelter for small groups of people. In the work of Jana Gombikova, this architectural relic is neither a monument nor a ruin. It is a living organism whose meaning has simply passed into other hands.
In the work of Juraj Toman, the scale of the city shrinks even further. What remains is the night, the glow of a streetlamp, an advertisement, an empty pavement, a random fragment of a street. It is not, however, a story exclusively about Trenčín. The city at night has its own geography, independent of its size. Loneliness in the suburbs has a similar temperature regardless of whether it is in Trenčín or New York. Perhaps the only difference is how long you have to walk before you encounter someone along the way.
Andrej Danóczi, meanwhile, consistently returns to Trenčín itself, piecing it together from fragments of reality into animated images. Here, the city becomes not so much a subject as a material — something that can be taken apart, reassembled and looked at anew. Trenčín is today the European Capital of Culture. It is quite a big title for a city that, in certain situations, can be crossed on foot faster than it takes to explain what contemporary culture actually is. But perhaps that is precisely what makes this moment interesting. The city does not suddenly become cultural simply because it has received the title. The title merely draws attention to what is already happening here: artists, studios, collectives, exhibitions, conversations and attempts to tell stories about the world from one’s own, specific place.
The artists associated with FOR MAAT Gallery demonstrate something simple: you do not have to live in a big city to engage with big issues. Sometimes all you need is a good place from which to observe them.