Way we were

In our local creative project using archives, we started to work in January 2015 with the team of eight inmates from Prešov prison, Open Department, which is our main partner in this activity. Inmates are very motivated, as well as many other participants from students, citizens, artists professionals which joined the project. As a main topic, line, of our local creative process is the work with our personal memories, especially from the childhood and the time of socialism in Czechoslovakia, mostly between 1960-89.

We work on two main lines:
– photographic and film archives and their using in an artistic process (except of our basic film and photo archive from the PAC association we got three other photo personal archives from inmates and one film archive, which were scanned and we use them). In this line we also spent time by learning technical and artistic approach to photo and film material generally, with emphasize on own creative approach of every participant. We combine visual material from archives with written and verbal memories of individual participants, either inmates or free persons and we combine their memories together to find some more general story about the time and our society.
– In photographic line we are working on a subproject called City memory, when we try to catch a genius loci of PreÅ¡ov, the second largest city of East Slovakia, pretty typical for this region, especially moments of „frozen“ time showing situation before 1989.
The third line is going on from the time of the second workshop with Spanish team, and is based on theatrical/performance approach to the archive material. We made more dance and performance workshops with inmates, including theatrical workshop with new member of the team Viliam Čikovský, a director. Our plan is to prepare the theatrical performance of the all participants, especially inmates in Prešov prison (connected with the topic of memory) at the end of year for public and schools from the region. It is a plan to be shown outside but also inside the prison.

The final presentation of this project is planned as a photo exhibition, film secreening, projections, installation, book/comics presentation and live performance (for Kosice event planned in July 2016 and public in Prešov).