kinoeye quotidian

[niminy-piminy]

Going through the old pictures, in 2013 i made a snapshot of Karlín Studios (one of my fav Prague art galleries). Karlín Studios was in this building between 2005-2016. It is no more. It's gone. Development.


Karlín is a Prague's district at the foot of the Vítkov hill. Notice also the gray building above the Karlín Studios on top of the hill...

It is National Monument at Vítkov Hill...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... %C3%ADtkov
It was built in-between WW1 and WW2 (to commemorated the Hussite battle which took place on the spot in the Middle Ages and also the horrors of WW1), but after commie-take-over in 1948, the idea was to turn it into a mausoleum of the local leading Stalinist figure who died in 1953 (after coming back from Stalin's funeral).

The examples came from Lenin's Mausoleum in Moscow and the Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum in Sofia.

Klement Gottwald's body was exhibited in the center of the Mausoleum in a glazed sarcophagus. The embalmed body was dressed in the blue general's uniform of the Head Commander of Czechoslovak armies. In 1958 it was changed to civilian attire.

However, Bohemians are not as good in mummification as Soviets (not to speak of Egyptians) and thus the unholy commie body began to rot and had to be cremated in 1962.

In 2011, i saw in Karlín Studios exhibited f.e. this table...


and also this mural (made of staples)...


But again, it's all (table, staples, mummy) gone!

[rischka]

holy crap it's 45F and hummies still out here like it aint no thing

[niminy-piminy]

i just read in news, yesterday burned in Prague the orthodox church of St. Michael from the 17th century...
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr%C3%A1 ... 99%C3%ADn)

when i was on uni, my student dormitory was nearby. i was not aware of the existence of this church yet. once, i went for a stroll in the park and stumbled upon this exotic wooden building out of the blue and couldn't grasp what's going on (for a moment i thought i am hallucinating). it was beyond my comprehension to encounter a building like this in Prague. so i made some investigations and figured out it was transferred to Prague in 1929 from Subcarpathian Ruthenia. between WW1 and WW2, Subcarpathian Ruthenia was part of Czechoslovakia (after WW2 taken away by Soviets). in preWW2 times some Bohemian filmmakers shot movies in Ruthenia...
https://letterboxd.com/film/spring-in-s ... -ruthenia/
https://letterboxd.com/film/song-of-ruthenia/
https://letterboxd.com/film/marijka-the-unfaithful/
prior to 1929 transfer from Ruthenia to Prague, it was already transferred in 1793 from one Ruthenian village to another (richer). it's questionable if buildings should be moved freely this way (making these recontextualizations), but the church of St. Michael was not the only one. there were some more and i saw another one in Eastern Bohemia thereafter (once i learned about those transfers).
anyway. i hope, some plans of the building exist (made in the past by the conservation/monument office) and it will be restored (in a simulacrum replica).

[rischka]

ah ha i see it snowed in october too! disappearing fast

[niminy-piminy]

very cool pics!

[rischka]

thx jiri! i just happened to go outside at the right time lol

https://twitter.com/rbgscfz/status/1354 ... 72129?s=20

the last one i took w my phone

[niminy-piminy]

A few days ago, I was strolling on Prague's White Mountain.

The most famous military conflict was here 400 years ago, on November 8, 1620, when the Battle of White Mountain took place. Almost 50,000 mercenaries took part in the battle, the number of fallen soldiers is unknown, it's estimated between 2 and 5 thousand men. The battle lasted two hours and, despite its short duration, influenced Czech history for 300 years, including violent re-Catholicization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_White_Mountain
An army of 15,000 Bohemians ... was defeated

Despite in general Bohemian mindset "White Mountain" is synonymous with "Waterloo", on the spot, there is a Catholic sacral building called "Our Lady of Victory Shrine on the White Mountain".
Its door was open, I peeked in, nobody was around, so I entered and made a pilgrimage all around its ambit gallery.

The ambit gallery looked like this.
In one part, there were architectural models illustrating the development of the complex.
The model in the last picture shows how the current state looks like.

The Baroque complex was built between 1704 to 1730 on the site of the Battle of White Mountain. The central pilgrimage site comprises a church with a cross-shaped floor plan with a central shrine, surrounded by a cloister with chapels and a convent of Benedictine nuns.

As you can notice on the pics showing the ambit gallery, on the walls, there were many wall paintings (in various degrees of decay).
I took pictures of those most devastated because they offer boundless prospects of exegesis.




In one of the corner-chapels is being worshiped a holy skeleton.
I was taking the picture with my phone through the glass, so the holy skeleton is mostly hidden behind the reflection.
However, its holy skull is still traceable, I guess.

[sally]

went out looking for birds today and aside from the aforementioned dipper and one buzzard didn't do that well. on the other hand i did see 12 roe deer and some lesser spotted techno sheep. however it was so cold that after a while i couldnt feel my face and i've been home for a few hours and i still can't warm up. am going to bed.

[greennui]

Count em techno sheep. I went for a run last week and it took me about 48 hours before I could feel warmth again.

[sally]

evidence: trees

still outraged by greennui suggesting we don't have trees here i went out on a very foggy no-light lunch-hour to obtain proof. however, i have the soul of a tiny bird and all trees are merely things for predators to hide behind. i swear when i was taking one of the pics a dark figure appeared in the camera and wasn't there when i looked up beyond it. dunno about forest-bathing, what's the german word for forest-shit-yer-pants?

[greennui]

Probably just Spring-heeled Jack going for a stroll.

Are those things really trees? Looks more like tall moss to me...

[sally]

blown through the ruin porn window that 2015 opened i went in search of such things today

(i may make a letterboxd list, there doesn't seem to be one? although it would be short...mozos' ruinas, geyrhalter's homo sapiens, thom andersen's reconversão...and....anything about detroit?)

also got halfway through reading this (lured in by blanchot & agamben) before i decided i should actually leave the house & get some fresh air
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42583177.pdf






& some cool rainbow fungi i've never seen before


tbh there are way more ruins around but i've pulled a muscle in my arm, it started raining and i've just got no energy so bollocks to whimsical memento moris, am just gonna sit in front of the telly with a cup of tea and a chocolate hobnob (against the law to say that any other way than below) and fall asleep to episodes of time team

https://twitter.com/BottomStuff/status/ ... 8396717059

[niminy-piminy]

(i may make a letterboxd list, there doesn't seem to be one? although it would be short...mozos' ruinas, geyrhalter's homo sapiens, thom andersen's reconversão...and....anything about detroit?)

make it! I will be a regular ruin entry suggestor.

https://lightcone.org/en/film-12605-loutra-baths
A mesmerizing study of an ancient Roman bath and palace complex in Arcadia.

https://letterboxd.com/film/sic-transit ... -heraklea/

https://iffr.com/en/2006/films/detroit-park

https://vimeo.com/95521674

https://vimeo.com/230751513

https://archive.org/details/89034-ruins ... nd-baalbek

And speaking about ruins and tea at five (and possibly a marble cake), some years ago I made these pics in my East Bohemian hometown.
In approximately the same time, in the local newspaper was published an article saying that our small town was rated (among all the towns and cities in the whole Czech Republic) "3rd best place to live" and "132nd best place to do business".
Thus whenever I share these pictures I accompany them with a caption...
3rd best place to live
132nd best place to do business

[niminy-piminy]

strictly speaking, this film is about "unfinished constructions".
but at one point, an "unfinished construction" and a "ruin" are not much different.

http://lotteschreiber.com/domino/

https://dafilms.com/film/8268-domino

As Robert Smithson said, if you trigger specific associations from a site, if you deal directly with its visual appearance, with that which Roland Barthes calls the "simulacrum of the object," then the goal is to understand a new type of structure as a whole, which generates new meanings.

"Domino" describes a construction system of reinforced concrete developed by Le Corbusier in 1914. This form of construction revolutionized modern architecture, freeing the walls of their carrier function and thereby opening up entirely new possibilities for design. For this project, the media artist Lotte Schreiber undertook a journey in winter through Greece to film anonymous architectures; the commonly found concrete skeletons. These incomplete spatial fragments, conceived as residences or hotel complexes, inscribe themselves into the Mediterranean surroundings as foreign geometric bodies and are found in barren mountain and coastal landscapes. Schreiber uses these "primary structures" as a framework and geographical reference system for the surrounding landscape by means of strictly framed black-and-white photographs. While the concrete cubes are systematically scanned on Super8 film, Schreiber uses a digital video camera to document the car journeys around Peloponnesus and on the island of Crete. In the metric montage, she allows the filmic material to meet and constructs an exact temporal structure. Whereas the original sound is audible in the staccato-cut video sequences, the film recordings are set to electronic sounds by Stefan Németh. This unusual "road movie" is the third part of a series of attempts by Lotte Schreiber to create "cinematic cartographies". (Norbert Pfaffenbichler)

[greennui]

Love the pics, Sally.

[sally]

3rd best place to live
132nd best place to do business

lol! that is indeed a recommendation! imagine the shame of being only the 133rd best place to do business

[sally]

feeling very spring! today, the wild flowers are starting to bloom, catching up with rischka..

[rischka]

LOL it's snowing here. i wish i was kidding

[sally]

all the spring lambs are out today! i saw actual gambolling, so cute. also saw the writer horatio clare sat on his doorstep bashing away on a laptop, also cute, but didn't take a pic cuz that would be weird.

[rischka]

gamboling! a pig gamboled by here the other day

[...]

Better be careful, where there's one feral hog, 30 to 50 more will surely follow in short order. But then I guess that's why y'all carry assault rifles down there, to fight off them awful hogs.

[sally]

visibility: ghost category
(see also: scott barley's the ethereal melancholy of seeing horses in the cold)

yet another day where i freak myself out hallucinating malevolence in nature and run all the way home.
(& also yet another day where i see the writer horatio clare, jeez am gonna have to say something to him next time cuz i feel like i'm accidentally stalking him. should probably read one of his books first, maybe the peter huttonish down to the sea in ships...but that also feels like stalking, perhaps it's best if i just don't go over that part of the valley for a few years)

[rischka]

these photos are gorgeous, i love mist/fog which we don't see often here

[sally]

gorgeous but feckin terrifying, the mist got thicker and closer and there were people-sized denser patches swirling around the blanket white (cathy!!!!!) before i legged it. i made up for my cut-short walk today tho and went miles and miles and miles and now my blisters have blisters. am crippled.

[sally]

speaking of cathy am reminded of a disgusting trip up to wuthering heights once, the wind was gently wuthering, the bogs were perfectly black, the sun had been dutifully scared away by the poems of ted hughes and when i finally got up there, there were some absolute cretins blasting out tinny-sounding kate bush on their phones, which sounded so woefully mechanical it couldn't even out-noise the larks. how fucking idiotic. ruined the atmosphere, and did a disservice to the song, which is not made for nature. i seriously tutted at them.

approach to wuthering heights from the linton house from 2005. (its the little black line in the middle on the horizon) i haven't been there for 18 months cuz its just too far to get there and back without public transport

[sally]

what do you reckon - are the ringed areas the same spur do you you think? i'm just too far away and need to get a bit closer?

[niminy-piminy]

to me, it seems like the same area! cool.

[rischka]

i haven't been out lately but i will hike this week to check on wildflowers activity. meanwhile there's a pot of gold at the horse farm across the creek

[niminy-piminy]

almost a double rainbow!

[rischka]

sad lack of wildflowers on the trail today but this bunny was almost friendly



came home to find pigs eating my garbage