Timeline of Disaster

I have often heard people close to me say, “You spend your whole life building something, lose it in an instant, and then spend the rest of your life trying to put it back together.” I experience this feeling firsthand whenever I walk through my hometown, which was destroyed by a tornado a few years ago. Even after several years, the wound is still fresh and stinging.
In my work, I explore the course of a natural disaster and its temporality from the perspective of someone affected by it. For the work, I chose a model scale; we thus view the work from above and gain distance from the event. The work continuously maps transformations. At first, we find ourselves in the part where a person builds, creates, and constructs. This smooth development is unexpectedly interrupted by a very powerful force. The person loses their footing; their world collapses.
The remaining two-thirds of the timeline are taken up by the effort to reestablish the original order and the natural course of events. The first steps are very rapid and clearly visible. Everything must be cleared away, cleaned up, and rebuilt. The closer the person gets to the original order, the longer each subsequent step takes. Over time, you realize that there is no chance of returning everything to its original state. Something is always missing; the work is incomplete and suffers. The trauma persists.

text Darina Molatová, 2024
photo © AVU / R. Dětinský, 2024