A site specific installation for:

ODRADEKS
Sound, Kinetic and Other Interventions in the House

curated by Miloš Vojtechovský
4+4+4 Days in Motion, Jungmannova 21,Prague

2min. Quicktime, 3.2 MB

Cleaning is a motor activated installation. The daylight entering the room activates cleaning gestures. The brighter the sunlight, the more vigorous the mechanical gestures will clean. Sandpaper and a sponge clean the wall, while a brush and a duster clean the floors of a deteriorating building in the center of Prague. Old paint chips from the walls swing by the window like a mobile, allowing the sunlight to turn on and off the light sensors that in turn, activate and deactivate the cleaning motors more randomly. Participants could also press the light sensors to activate the cleaning motion.

C L E A N I N G
Kinetic and Interactive Objects
by Lisa Moren

Artists, musicians and theater companies were invited to work throughout the abandoned dental clinic and apartment house in the center of Prague, to create works responding to the site's history, location and structure.

In one of his short stories, set in the stairwell of an unnamed Prague apartment building, Franz Kafka describes meeting a grotesque creature to which he gave the strangely Slavic-sounding name of Odradek. Standing on the grounds of the Jewish Gardens, probably one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Prague and abolished by King Vladislav at the end of the 15th century, the somewhat spooky atmosphere of an abandoned house became an inspiration for several minimal interventions in a section of the 3rd floor of the House.

Even though, Odradek is only a clumsy and somewhat crafty but idle mechanism, homeless, without a temporary dwelling, built out of wooden spools and balls of thread, just his essential existence, which is somewhere in the realm of an insect creeping about, offers the metaphor for whimsy to some of the temporary tenants. Well, what s your name you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. And where do you live? “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. The temporary dwelling place and Odradek’s section is occupied by guests of Prague Nové Mesto who came from faraway Japan and America, and includes students from FAMU: Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague collaborating with their colleagues from Prague art and technical schools. Some of them chose as their subject the concrete memory embedded in the architecture. Others probed imaginatively into the layers of the seemingly empty building wherein history has stood still for 15 years, where the timeless residue lingers from the

1980s. There have been seemingly many changes behind the windows. However, if you think about it a little, this may be only our illusion or wish. Just the kinds and designs of Odradeks are today naturally much more sophisticated than a hundred years ago.

Even though, Odradek is only a clumsy and somewhat crafty but idle mechanism, homeless, without a temporary dwelling, built out of wooden spools and balls of thread, just his essential existence, which is somewhere in the realm of an insect creeping about, offers the metaphor for whimsy to some of the temporary tenants. Well, what s your name you ask him. “Odradek,” he says. And where do you live? “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves. The temporary dwelling place and Odradek’s section is occupied by guests of Prague Nové Mesto who came from faraway Japan and America, and includes students from FAMU: Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague collaborating with their colleagues from Prague art and technical schools. Some of them chose as their subject the concrete memory embedded in the architecture. Others probed imaginatively into the layers of the seemingly empty building wherein history has stood still for 15 years, where the timeless residue lingers from the 1980s. There have been seemingly many changes behind the windows. However, if you think about it a little, this may be only our illusion or wish. Just the kinds and designs of Odradeks are today naturally much more sophisticated than a hundred years ago.

Miloš Vojtechovský, May 2006