Photography, New media art
While reading the philosophical novel "Flock without Birds - A Story" by Filip Doušek, I came across a passage where the main character reads a fictional scientific publication about the Church of St. Nicholas in Prague.
Collective of authors - Houses, faces of the time. Guide to Symbols in Architecture, 2003. Volume 4: Office and Institutions, pp. 136–138.
Church of St. Nicholas Church on Old Town Square in Prague was built at the height of the Baroque period between 1732 and 1737.
The symbolism of St. Nicholas stands out particularly clearly in the light of history. In the foundations of the Baroque building lay the ruins of a Gothic Benedictine church, which was in turn built on the site of a Romanesque shrine from the 11th century. These three consecutive buildings share not only place and function but, shaped by a single faith since the third century almost unchanged, also a similar ground plan and architectural symbols. The intersection of the three in time following shrines can thus be considered a separate abstract building. It is stronger than the stone churches (it already outlived the two previous) and each symbol has a precise place in it.
The term "abstract building" immediately caught my attention and I wanted to represent it somehow. I soon started to merge 3D models of buildings into each other, creating physically impossible amalgamations of architectural styles.
At first, I explored architecture as a marker of collective identity (culture, religion, state), attempting to directly and explicitly reference contemporary conflicts, such as wars of the 20th century as well as present wars.
I often too explicitly tried to depict various wars and conflicts, whether historical (eg. the war in Yugoslavia, WWII (16 models)) or ongoing conflicts. At the end of my two-year research and dead-end efforts, I returned to the initial simple idea and created a model consisting of three temples of the Abrahamic religions merged together, being
For the purpose of the semestral work, I converted the resulting model into the real world form using 3D printing and placed it in space together with a video installation of physically impossible flybys through the model.
With sincere gratitude for the invaluable support of