Katarína Poliačiková – Skipping School, Learning the Fire of Things

#1 min Markéta Kinterová, Katarína Poliačiková

15. 2. 2020

POLIAČIKOVÁ, Katarína. Skipping School, Learning the Fire of Things. Ostrava: Fine Arts of Central Europe, 2019. ISBN 978-80-907126-2-1.

The spine of the book says “The book that is Oooooooh”, but its title is Skipping School, Learning the Fire of Things. The author claims she can romanticize anything. This pocket-sized book, whose aims include the creation of something like a catalogue of these last years, seems to awaken our curiosity naturally, like an unobtrusive pet. Artist books can be read from the start or the middle, and this is exactly the case in which we can either read haphazardly or really focus our attention on the whole. A flip book at the end. Some poetic twists here and there. Some essays. On happiness. On urinating. On in-between times. On perception. On photography. On something and nothing. Hhhhhhhm or Oooooooh.

Text | Markéta Kinterová

Markéta Kinterová

is the artistic director of Fotograf.zone and the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Fotograf. Her practice focuses on artistic research related to public space. She teaches at the Department of Photography at FAMU, Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Katarína Poliačiková

is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. She studied in Prague, Bratislava, Berlin, New York, Lisbon and other cities. She works with photography, installation and video.

#35 living with humans

People reflect themselves through things that surround them. They are part of the animal kingdom, yet they do not include themselves into it. They separate their selves from the whole, and this gradual exclusion of the ego from the general context leads to the dualism of the relationship between the man and nature, not to the idea of the man as its consciously sociable part. In his lecture Too Human World, Philippe Descola states that the society does not own nature, but nature owns us. He speaks of the possibility of granting human rights to all kinds of living and inanimate nature, as do communities and natural peoples living in harmony with the landscape and living creatures. Images of animals have accompanied human culture since the times of cave paintings, but photography seems to be in a more complicated position of a modern technical tool. The keywords photography – of animals primarily evoke spectacular images of wild animals from exotic parts of the world, which do their protagonists disservice in the long run. The ambition of this issue is to suggest a different, non-linear view of the relationship between the man and fauna, trying to reflect its original nature, including the context of the impact of human activity.