Archeology of Winter

Andrea Kalinová, Mária Novotná and the Temporary Ski Club

24. 7. 2026, Kiosk festival
Ski Chrenčíny, Považský Chlmec

performance for a ski slope

It’s summer. We’re on a ski slope, and we have our skis.
A performative lecture on the future of towns that were built for snow but are now left without it, on ski lifts that lead nowhere, and on winter as it fades into memory. The performance will culminate in a carnival and bring the season at the Ski Chrenčiny slope to a close.

foto: Katarína Zvolenská

One of the first outcomes of the Archaeology of Winter project by Andrea Kalinová and Mária Novotná was a multidisciplinary performative event on the slope of Považský Chlmec. The project is conceived as an interdisciplinary research project combining artistic and documentary photography with architectural, landscape, and historical research. It explores the disappearing winter cultural landscape through the themes of abandonment, the transformation of mountain environments, cultural identity, and the relationship between people and landscape.

The authors understand archaeology as a process of searching for, documenting, and interpreting cultural artefacts in the landscape. These include not only buildings and technical infrastructure, but also ski slopes, meadows, forest clearings, viewpoints, and the rhythms of how the landscape is used. The project traces how the meanings of skiing, recreation, and winter sports have changed over the past century, and what traces they have left behind in the landscape.

At the Kiosk Festival, the project was presented as a collective event involving the authors, architectural historian Martin Zaiček, dramaturg Magdaléna Žiaková, intermedia artist Juraj Mydla, and the Temporary Ski Club. Visitors followed a symbolic “ski route” led by a ski-lift operator: they passed through a slalom exhibition of photographs, encountered performing carnival characters, listened to lectures, and collectively reinterpreted the tradition of village ski carnivals. For one day, a summer meadow was transformed into a ski slope and a site of collective memory, symbolically bringing one ski season to a close while simultaneously opening up a new field of research.

The project also critically reflects on the consequences of the industrialisation of winter sports and technological interventions in mountain landscapes. The aim of Archaeology of Winter is to map and interpret artefacts of different scales—from individual lift towers to entire ski resorts—and, through them, to understand the processes that have shaped the winter cultural landscape and its ongoing transformation.

Participants / Skiers: Magdaléna Žiaková, Juraj Mydla, Petra Balíková, Martinka Bobríková, Martin Zaiček, Martin Toldy, Tereza Zubanová, Andrea Kalinová, Mária Novotná, Alica Köverová, Viktória Oroszová, Monika Stankovičová, Henrieta Virágová