František Skála

“Me and my friend from school created some collapsible as-if-assault-rifles which we then carried in a violin case, imitating some movie we saw. We even had the screw-on silencers in those small violin cases. Equipped with this we would organize expeditions downtown. There, we would always enter a bank and then walk around until somebody sent us off. I specifically recall one spot in Lucerna Palace. We would walk up the stairs and then lay out those cases, screw our guns together and lurk there as gangsters. Then we would pack them up again. Usually we took tram No. 26 downtown. At that time, these were old trams – a front carriage with two platforms and in the back a tow car with the ticket inspector. He would regularly validate people’s tickets but if one rode on the platform of the first car, he wouldn’t get checked at all. We made marks for how many times we have taken this or that tram because some of them were our favorite ones. For instance, I remember No. 2144 to this day.”

“Over the time I was slowly returning to my free art works – at the moments of emptiness and inner pressure from sitting down all day and doing stuff. I began as a sort of a Sunday artist, saying to myself that I would do my own works during the weekends when I could relax. There was a moment of self-reflection, a breakthrough when I fully liberated myself from all the school clichés and the work I was trying to do, going back to childhood and the freest possible design. It was in fact very brutal as far as the media and the tools I used are concerned. I had real fits of happiness doing that. I once again began working with wood, but no longer as a carver who would be doing something very delicate there. I started to use an axe, a hammer and a screwdriver with which I dag on purpose to approach this naïve, sincere design, extracting something from the material. The topics followed suit. There was a tickle of absurdity there which I had felt with the arrival of post-modernism. Obviously, I had some information about what was going on in the West. But at the same time I was really surprised to feel the pull of the era… The Iron Curtain did not work in this respect. It was something which I had inside me, which I didn’t need to see in foreign catalogues.”

“At high school I already had a narrower circle of friends whom I stayed friends with for years to come. And we did things which from today’s perspective seem rather incomprehensible. For instance, as it was impossible to travel to the West, we would instead go every summer to the Bulgarian seaside, eight years in a row. That was an unforgettable experience which probably heavily influenced my career. We would always live there for three weeks as cavemen – naked, in some area where there were few tourists. In fact, we walked through the whole seaside and picked two or three spots. We lived there as outlaws, hidden from the Bulgarian snitches and the police which was after us because we didn’t have an accommodation stamp in our passports. We managed to vegetate there like that. And the experience of living at the seashore in what was back then a fairly deserted spot was completely amazing.”