Dancing on the Ruins of a Museum

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  Dancing on the Ruins of a Museum | 2015

A vase made by Olga Hudečková, today a virtually unknown ceramist from the 1970s, is transferred from a private collection to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, where preparations for a reconstruction of the historic building are about to begin. The permanent exhibition of applied arts has already been closed. Collections are packed into boxes, and the building is being emptied. Archives are loaded into wooden crates and are awaiting their transport. Items from the collection are moved around after many years at their residence in the bowels of the museum. Under these circumstances a turntablist is placing a vase on top of a turntable in the interior of the museum. The vase rotates in a circular motion that once enabled its creation in a ceramics workshop. Vinyl records from the years 1963–1990, including various recordings of Smetana's “My Country”, are used as a musical basis for improvisation with a ceramic object. The musician deconstructs the pathetic melody of “Vltava” and connects it with a play on the actual vase. Instead of nostalgically playing a known melody, a nervous audio fun-fare emerges from the circular tracks of plates/records.