Coffee with…
The idea of “Coffee with…” is to capture my encounter with an inspiring person as genuinely as possible and to emphasise our meeting as flesh and blood persons to fight the creeping domination of disincarnated relations of social media.
…Lenka Kerdová
We sat and spoke together with Lenka on one nice sunny Monday afternoon in Vienna…
Art is the focal point of Lenka’s work and life. She is both a practising artist and an art historian, so navigates the waters of both art and academia. Her holistic approach to art allows her to understand hermeneutical questions about her work not only consciously, rationally, but also unconsciously through the senses: for example, by building the methodology for her research on the interwar architecture of German-speaking architects with the help of the painting process. Lenka’s fascinating project, which of course touches on many aspects of her personal life, is a great inspiration to me. I especially appreciate Lenka’s idea of capturing and illustrating her methodological approach with a painting.
In the aquarelle painting you can see three pure colours (blue, yellow and red) which overlap. In some places, such as between yellow and red, the colours blend, creating a gradient rather than a sharp transition. In other places the edges of the individual layers are strictly defined; in still others they fall apart or become absorbed into each other. According to the theory of colour mixing, one would assume that such a simple experiment would produce unambiguous results. For example, by adding blue to the yellow layer, one creates green. Here we see that this is clearly not the case with watercolour, where the quality of each factor (paper, pigment, drying time, etc.) brings its own significance.
In the centre of the figure, where all the layers overlap, a highly colourful and plastic space is created, where after some time we can find different phases of intersection of the individually coloured layers. In the very centre we see a predominance of blue. Just below this, as if by accident, a small triangle has been formed by combining the orange layer with the blue, which goes beyond the proposed procedure.
The three pure colours are the three layers of my research. This visual metaphor seeks to bring home the point of variously interpenetrating layers and a network of relationships among the various actors, and to offer a structural model to be gradually supplemented, if possible, from future resources.
The first layer concerns the concrete historical situation in interwar Prague. I use historical, sociological, ethnological, and political sources. I focus on the Czechoslovak legislative framework regarding ethnic minorities, the phenomenon of ‘Tripolis Prague’ (Prague as a city of three nations, Czechs, Germans, and Jews, living side by side), and the problem of ‘Pragocentrism’ (whereby the capital city of Prague is disproportionately favoured above other places and cities in what was then Czechoslovakia). A plastic picture of the conditions and atmosphere of interwar Prague thereby emerges. This layer explores the terminological thread, specifically, what to call German-speaking architects now and how the terms ‘Deutschböhem’, ‘Sudeten-‘, and so on, have been used across history, and the question of language itself (the phenomenon of bilingualism). Finally, the basis of social and educational platforms is presented, closely connected to the German-speaking architects (including schools, periodicals and journals, theorists, professional associations, and construction cooperatives).
The second layer consists of zooming in on the architectural scene in Prague and several key studies of the individual architects and their work.
The third and final layer zooms out onto the European context. In this layer, Prague is viewed from the perspective of the European German-speaking cultural space. Vienna and Budapest are an indivisible part of the framework because both are important centres of the former state. Similarly, Bratislava – the new main centre of Slovakia and a place from which to see Prague’s German architecture from a certain distance, yet still within Czechoslovakia – must not be excluded. In Germany, I chose the largest cities – Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, and Hamburg – according to a purely geographical key, because a significant link between particular German cities (for example Dresden, which would be relevant to Sudeten German architects) and Prague’s German architects is yet to be found.
My research is not a style-based analysis of interwar architecture in the given cities and their comparison with Prague, but rather a mapping of the German-language terrain which enables a new understanding of ‘German architecture’ in Prague. The mapping of the selected cities serves to create a picture of the interwar architectural scene and of the main themes and problems to be solved. I emphasise interwar residential construction, as for Prague German architects this type of construction is predominant.
Thank you, Lenka, for sharing the painting with me and for the commentary to your artwork!
* Lenka’s research will be published as a book in 2022.
Painting by courtesy of ©Lenka Kerdová 2021.
