Pozun_sk

POŽUN_SK
2021 / digital photography, text, map, website

I.
Since the victory of the Turkish side in the battle of Mohács in 1526, a massive population movement took place in Central, Middle Eastern and Southern Europe. Within it, people from the territory of today's Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, from various social classes, magnates, peasants, colonists of small territories, who according to various ethnographic and subjective criteria come to be called Croats, come to the territory of what was then Hungary and Austria.

The very homogenization of the narrative of a united "Slovak" nation during the 20th century took place in several waves. These waves can be identified through major state-building events: the creation of the first Czechoslovakia and the need to strengthen the identity of Czechoslovakia. Tisov The Slovak state, in turn, needed to cleanse the image of the common people from any ethnically foreign elements, including an explanation of the origin of surnames. The end of the Second World War and the departure of various groups of the population, thanks to Beneš's decrees, again aimed at the state-building idea of ​​Czech-Slovakism.

Leaving aside the popular narrative of Slovakness as an idea of ​​a geographically native and linguistically and culturally original and homogeneous entity, several questions arise. If there has been community adaptation that began almost five hundred years ago, can we speak of an already completed process of acculturation and enculturation? Why do we work with the term "minority culture" in the case of the Croatian element?

Festivals and various other support events for the preservation of "minority" culture and its "heritage" have been held officially and often with the support of the state since the 1990s, but its place in contemporary Slovak society (which can be perceived through language elements, surnames, urban interventions, toponyms) remains a "white spot" in the debate on identity in mainstream society.

Thinking about relations in a geographical area outside the usual thematic axis Hungarians-Slovaks, Germans-Slovaks or Czechs-Slovaks can lead to new perspectives on collective identity.

II.
The Požun_SK project is based on this situation, the aim of which is to present public space as a space of geographical memory in which the naming of a place, its historical and current significance contain discontinuities of development.

Documentary photographs are based on physical walks around places as well as walks in various information sources. Palimpsests, transcriptions and translucency of various interpretations, stories and information can be found in both "places".

The walk in hyperlinks continues in an open-source map with additional layers, which is open to future entry.


Supported using public funding in the form of stipend by Minority Culture Fund Slovakia. 

Share by: