Authors: Gabriella Antal, Péter Bach, Katalin Fazekas, Miklós Vannay
The act that we labelled afterwards – As The Graves ‘Draw’ – was realised as a very simple side-project during the workshop MEIA EUC ERASMUS IP I. at Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia. The artistic theory was built up following three main ideas as guidelines:
– first the recalling of the hidden beauties and long forgotten memories of the cemetery that had been coded and carved into the tombstones
– second to get into a kind of physical contact with the material essence in order to sense and understand the wider context in which they are impregnated
– and third to exhibit the developed transcripts or copies – already detached from their original subjects – as new autonomous works of art that still strongly refer to the original substance.
As we believed, the primal layer of the act was the ideological approach that had to be realised with the simplest but most effective and subservient implements. Apart from this we considered that the completed artefacts had to represent a deep contrast to their ‘casting moulds’ – they have to be immaterial in contrast to the strong materiality of the stone and provisional as against the eternity. This we intended to create by using the phenomena of the ‘contrast’, and use the see-through skin-like sketch paper on the rough granite stone surfaces. The processing itself relates to the photography or photocopy methods, using the tombstones as negatives to develop the hidden substances on the chosen media.
Finally we continuously documented the working process on film and on photos as well. The film was presented on the exhibition to involve the audience in the ‘making’ and to give further inspiration for the participants of the workshop.
