It is an old blue-collar neighborhood with a small island on the Moldau River in Prague, where I grew up. The island covers a little over half a square mile. Technically, it is a peninsula. But local people call it Libeň Island. Parts of it are quite unwelcoming, with storage facilities and a dubious dealership selling used cars. Yet there is an area of this island that seems to be resisting the changes of modern times. During the last ten years, I went to photograph there every time I visited Prague.
There is a small garden pub, furnished with discarded furniture and funky decorations. It lies completely hidden from the rest of the island. You can reach it only by following an overgrown path in the bushes. Going there feels like entering a secret door to a speakeasy. You can sip beer there and be transported half a century back in time.
There is a studio of a Czech sculptor, whose statues of athletes the Communists promoted in the 1960s. Now high-brow curators frown on them. But the decaying statues are still on display in the overgrown grass. You can walk by tiny municipal garden plots, where people grow vegetables, spend weekends in little cottages, and hang out around camp fires just like their grandparents did in the 1920s. A few smokestacks have been left behind when the city tore down the small factories they belonged to. These are now protected as industrial monuments under an obscure piece of Czech legislation.
Some six years ago, I started noticing posters from one developer promoting a forthcoming building project for Libeň Island. I was dismayed. The posters displayed idealized-but robotic looking-people in modern condos living in my neighbourhood. My time travels were scheduled for destruction.
But in time, I accepted the change-as if I had a choice-and came to terms with the posters and what they foretold. These harbingers of the disappearance of the Libeň Island I had known were themselves not immune to the ravages of time. As the posters became dirty, torn, and overgrown with vegetation, they began to fit into my idea of the neighborhood. I started to include them in my photos. During every pilgrimage to Libeň, I never missed a visit to the wall with these posters-and their replacements that needed some time to “fit in”-to record them as they wore away.
On my last trip to Libeň, all the posters were gone. So too was the wall where they had been displayed, the road in front of that wall, and the hill where the road had been. In its place: a giant construction site. To remember Libeň Island as it was, I only had some 2000 photos I had taken. I realized that, even though I thought that I had captured everything important, the project was still a work-in-progress. How would “my Libeň” co-exist with this new reality? I turned my lens to the construction site.
Around this time, I was struck by a strange synchronicity. I re-watched the avant-garde film Aimless Walk by Czech photographer and movie maker Alexandr Hackenschmied (who later changed his name to Hammid). He shot parts of this movie on Libeň Island almost 90 years ago. The film’s protagonist takes a streetcar to Libeň, walks there, seemingly aimlessly, and observes his surroundings. After a while, he lies down on the grass and falls asleep. When he wakes up, he retraces his steps to the street car stop. As he leaves, he looks back, and sees his own sleeping body in the grass. The scene suggests that part of him stayed there, or that time stopped existing in the traditional linear way, and both realities existed at the same time.
I had initially felt my walks in Libeň were aimless. I was wrong. This portfolio, which is titled Aimless Walk Reprise, visually retraces a dream-like reality-not unlike that of the film-where the past, present, and future coexist. Dock is the name of the construction project, Crestyl is the name of the developer.