Filip Smetana & Matěj Smetana

With a slight exaggeration, a museum is a place where the past is reconstructed. However, since it is not possible to accommodate its entire image in the museum showcases, it is also a place where the past is sorted, categorized and derived. This is then related to a certain degree of authoritarianism, because by selecting what events it shows and what exhibits it displays, the museum also creates a hierarchy of meanings. What is worthy of our attention, what is accepted as important, formative, and what is not. This is also the reason why the reconstructed past, rather than the flowing continuum, reminds us of a sequence of (discrete) steps. Instead of fibres, these are points in which our historical consciousness condenses. The theme of a selective approach to history and easy manipulability of its image also resonates in Filip and Matěj Smetana’s current exhibition project called Milestones. The installation of a minimalist nature consists of six concrete blocks of identical size, bearing a presumed date from the period of the second millennium AD. The objects thus actually pretend to be “data carriers”, just like tombstones and memorials. Contrary to expectations, however, the data they bear doesn’t refer to specific events, and what we see as days, months and years was determined by the Smetana brothers quite arbitrarily with the aid of a random number generator. It is just a format that implies meaning. In its essence, however, the given numbers are as abstract (non-referential) as the openings of various geometric forms made in the blocks. It is only a constant human need to ask about the sense and search for meanings even where they might not be. It is therefore not surprising that we prefer a false meaning than none.