Andrea Kalinová

Andrea Kalinová’s perspective is original: documentary, film, visual, but also anthropological. She likes to observe various bizarre situations, thus commenting on the broader social context. She has a sense of the absurd, subversive hyperbole, through which she comments on socio-cultural phenomena and the problems associated with them. The photography cycle The Last Snow has several, perhaps contradictory starting points. One of them is the author’s personal story of a former childhood competitive skier who loves snow, skiing and winter sports. The second is a testimony to the deepening environmental crisis, to which extensive ski resorts with artificial snow, high energy consumption, which significantly interfere with the life of plants and animals, as biotopes with hundreds of trees fall victim to ski slopes. The author does not resolve the internal contradiction in which the desire to reverse ecological threats and the experiential skiing that contributes to these threats are opposed by taking sides, but rather, humorously and sadly, glosses over the given status quo. Andrea Kalinová mapped ski resorts in Slovakia, noting abandoned ski lifts, ruins of ski jumps, rusty cable car torsos, persistent sledges and ski lifts descending from muddy slopes, ski lifts pulling athletes along a narrow strip of snow, or absurd-looking props from more successful ski seasons, such as the podiums of winners from ski races, or a faded gate of fame with the inscription The goal is to have a lot of joy. Well, there are only traces of joy, like snow, in the author’s photographs; nostalgia prevails, or the protagonists’ persistent effort to get going again. However, the climate crisis is inexorably progressing, and the cycle The Last Snow can also be read as a call to think about what we can do to slow it down. In the series of photographs, we also find a few staged photographs of skiers in forest thickets, dystopianally drawing attention to a possible near future.

Text: Lýdia Pribišová

Projekt podporil z verejných zdrojov formou štipendia Fond na podporu umenia a Nadácia Bratislavy