JESSICA SERRAN: SOUL OF CZECH | exhibition in library

The soul from Czechia

The Czech history is the history of the despair of identity. The word „identity“  was made up for the Czech. For a disputed nation of self-deconstructive doubters who endlessly search for their place on the Earth and in the Heaven. Some have sold their soul to Jessica Serran, for her to show them where exactly in the Universe they are standing right now. So a series of interviews and pictures was born.

I don’t believe that behind the layers of our experiences and the genetic gift hides something crystalline, as one could imagine the substance of soul.  After we forget all the memories, the forgotten ones as well as those persistent, after we delete the information of our predecessors hidden in the cells, after we cast away our education, there will be nothing left.  Paradoxically, the description of the soul across the cultures is something  totally alien to us. It is a nothing which we cannot imagine.  Possibly it is our goal – but it will not be recognized by those who we are now. And therefore it is not important whether it is eternal or not.

Field Guide to the Czech Psyche, the pictures and the book by the Canadian artist Jessica Serran, gives the reader – the imaginary soul – countrysides which must be deserted so that we could finally get lost, and contexts which must be disconnected, because the sense of their interconnection is illusory.  The psychoanalytical process of the author in which the interview is alchemically dissolved into a picture, creates a scary scenography of our desperate lives. Everyone who is giving his confession in the book had a picture of his answers created. The next step could be to act yourself in the background of your picture. However, the clusters of symbols, snippets of tissue, texts and ruins of architecture – ruins of life – can terrify its actor.

Ivan Mečl