Little castle, Kamnik
8.6. — 8 July 2016
Blaž Janežič, Dušan Letnar, Jana Nakrst, Simon Podgoršek, Aleš Senožetnik, Andrej Flerin, Katja Jeras
The Kamči exhibition is a continuation of the Two Places project. In the first part, the creators collided with the duality of their activity, the polar relationship between this and that place in their creative drive. This time they cut even further. If the first exhibition as a result of the collaboration between members of Fotoklub Kamnik and Peter Rauch was titled Two Places, Kamči should have been named Second Place, or even Second Venue. Kamči is a spaka, more precisely, a monster that wanders around Kamnik, the hometown of the participating authors, and each of them stalks him in one way or another during the course of the project, sets traps for him and tries to either tame him or expel him.
Let's imagine a pleasant family lunch. Everything is wonderfully homely, if we exclude the little thing or two that always spice up the event somehow. That embarrassment that appears in the domestic atmosphere and subverts it, turns it on its head and does not allow it to be fully itself. What prevents the full measure of domesticity in the home itself, that is precisely Kamča in Kamnik. The second place of the hometown — its scene. The exhibited works of five photographers show the confrontation with this monster, the spaka, which is lurking in their home. Aleš Senožetnik, for example, finds him in photos of the family album as a stranger who inadvertently stepped into the frame, carelessly sunbathing in the background of a happy family on vacation, or a minister who watches one of the necessary sacraments with red eyes. Simon Podgoršek settles in the hometowns of others as their problem, as someone who sheds light on what has been there all along, or appears as the one who has been expected all along, as a welcome unwelcome guest. Jana Nakrst finds the anguish of her hometown on the popular route to Samotne mlin. In a minimal change, an intervention in the image, the scene in the forest is no longer this one, but another, not completely, but a little foreign. As in the first part, Blaž Janežič faces the spaka again in his home workshop in the process of creative work. Where is the thing to grab by the horns? By shuffling techniques, he knows that the monster never lies in the content of the creative work, but in its form, in the technique, in the throbbing of that materiality, from which any content or even the ability to mean has flowed away, leaving only an empty voice, the screeching of the vocal cords, the mixing colors and overlaying meaningless layers of visual debris. Katja Jeras is following him in a similar way. Trying elementary photography tricks, she tricks him and sneaks up behind him so close that she realizes her own back is in front of her. Dušan Letnar lucidly places the monster in the figures of those who in one way or another drive the city, take care of it and develop it, but at the same time destroy it. Without the city's politics and economy, the issue would have neither power nor scope, and at the same time, precisely because of the political-economic way of functioning, the place is collapsing. The Kamči project is a project of exorcists, that extremely foreign honor that settles in our home and one cannot shake it off until one summons the exorcists who do the dirty work. Then home is home again? No, then the nightmare is just beginning. The home is falling apart, homeliness becomes unbearable. So what is the value of this beast? It is the thing that appears in the hometown as its current embarrassment, as the thing that we have to fix and everything will be the way it was again. Precisely in this obstruction is the value of this apparition — nowhere else is it as at home as here, in the familiarity of home. What's more, the monster is exactly the face of this domesticity, the one that, in principle, we manage to sweep under the carpet, but always somehow surprises with its appearance where we did not expect it. Nestvor is domesticity in its most original form, and this is precisely its most annoying and annoying feature. Kamči as a monster is that appendage, which would easily get the title of the oldest inhabitant of Kamnik, if not everyone would like to eliminate him somehow like a shilferderber. That's it Unheimliche, which is not placed in Heim rather, it is already there throughout, as its core, as its place, as a scene.
Peter Rauch
PHOTOS OF THE OPENING
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1030995146954315.1073741899.224568250930346&type=3
(photo: Lana Bregar)
