MONUMENT TO TRANSFORMATION

iniciators: Zbyněk Baladrán, Vít Havránek
cooperation/project manager: Věra Krejčová

The question we put to ourselves in the autumn of 2006 was a relatively simple one: What has happened in the twenty years since the fall of the "Iron Curtain" to us, to the artistic imagination, to society? How are we to relate today to the twenty-year period of transformation that we were, and still are, part of?

It is necessary in the first place to stand back somewhat from such a broadly formulated feeling and begin considering how that feeling and the need to grasp the contemporary present may be formulated. The transformation lays out before as a time segment the period 1989-2009, in the past demarcated by the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Socialist system, which was followed by the building of a new social order. Despite its great complexity, the transformation process has an inner compactness. If we define this period as one of transformation, the option presents itself to follow this transformation in comparison to similar processes in other countries or in scientific or social areas (on various levels), whereby the differences in the quality and quantity of the transformation should not be confused with the fundamental difference in the nature of such a process. This approach enables us to escape the confines of the local context of the Czech Republic and to consider social transformation not only in the obvious space of so-called "Eastern Europe", but also, and especially, beyond it. In the first step we expanded our research to countries outside of Eastern Europe that have undergone a similar transformation of the social system, such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, and in the next step we directed our interest towards the countries of Central America and Southeast Asia. An interest in transformation models in various periods liberated us from the trap of the polarised clichés of West-East/East-West. A new map emerged of the transformational perspective. The question yet to come is to what degree such a map may be coherent – whether it can represent countries that differ in the degree of transformation, but not in the nature of the transformation process.

When we speak of transformation, time is much more important than geography or geopolitics. Transformation in the passive sense is conducted within historical time (from-to) and this chronology generates historicity and sequential relationships.
 
In our model of transformation, we relate traditional historicity to human time and from this relationship we derive the following table, with the aid of which we try to reformulate the concept of past, present and future.

Of greater interest to us are the internal time and internal tempo of the transformations themselves. Focussing on the internal time of transformation processes in various countries leads us to a conviction of the unimportance of a quantification of time that is relative to conditions, which allows us to put the relatively rapid processes that we have witnessed in the last 20 years in our own space into the context of certain specific processes of long-term transformation, for example in Sweden or in Great Britain.

These processes differ in relative length, but not in their nature.

MONUMENT
These few comments have yet to tell us anything about what Monument to Transformation is.

- Monument to Transformation is an interdisciplinary environment (art, humanities, economic and natural science theories).

- is a delineation of the space in which art does not have to offer direct answers to political problems and social transformations, but instead investigates the prerequisites and conditions in which both politics and society seek their points of support

- is a series of exhibitions, projections, publications, debates and lectures going on for more than two years

- is an attempt to grasp the differences, connections and contradictions of the “transformation period” in the Czech Republic in the years 1989 – 2009

- is an attempt to achieve detachment from the directly experienced (the transformation in the Czech Republic) by means of setting our experience within a new global map of transformation (Argentina, Indonesia, South Korea, Portugal, Greece, Spain, “Eastern Europe” etc.).

- is a concentration of all the activities listed into an exhibition and an extensive publication in Prague Municipal Library

BOOK - ATLAS OF TRANSFORMATION
This book with almost 900 pages is a sort of global guidebook of transformation processes. With structured entries, its goal is to create a tool for the intellectual grasping of the processes of social and political change in countries that call themselves “countries of transformation” or are described by this term. The Atlas of Transformation will first appear in Czech and it contains more than 200 “entries” and key terms of transformation. Several dozen authors from the whole world contributed to this book and also some influential period texts were republished here. In September 2010, the book is going to be published in English in co-operation with the Swiss publishing house JRP-Ringier.

Publishing: tranzit.cz with cooperation with Swiss publishing house JRP-Ringier.
Editors: Zbyněk Baladrán, Vít Havránek in co-operation with Věra Krejčová
Authors: Josef Alan, Ayreen Anastas, Aristide Antonas, Babi Badalov, Zbynek Baladran, Ricardo Basbaum, Hrach Bayadyan, Maria Jose Belbel, Vaclav Belohradsky, Erick Beltran, Hakim Bey, Homi K. Bhabha, Egon Bondy, Svetlana Boym, Boris Buden, Cabello/Carceller, Nerea Calvillo, Vaclav Cilek, Ana Paula Cohen, Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, Jiri David, Juliane Debeusscher, Gilles Deleuze, Angela Detanico, Rafael Lain, Vladimira Dvorakova, Joanna Erbel, Jindrich Fibich, Francois Marie Charles Fourier, Rene Gabri, Mariano Garcia, Ernest Gellner, Adela Gjuricova, Bohumila Grogerova, Boris Groys, Marina Grzinic, Pierre-Felix Guattari, Joao Maria Gusmao a Pedro Paiva, Jiri Havel, Vaclav Havel, Friedrich August von Hayek, Beatriz Herraez, Josef Hirsal, Ludvik Hlavacek, Karl Holmqvist, Cyril Hoschl, Ilja a Vlastimila Hradecti, Keti Cuchrov, Jaime Iregui, Katrien Jacobs, Frederic Jameson, Ana Janevski, Tomas Jezek, Ilja Kabakov, Jiri Kabele, Franz Kafka, Jens Kastner, Jan Keller, Alexander Kiossev, Vaclav Klaus, Milan Knizak, Stanislav Komarek, Karel Kosik, Zdenek Kosek, Primoz Krasovec, David Kulhanek, Jiri Kunc, Andrei Lankov, Eileen Legaspi- Ramirez, Mikolaj Lewicki, Mark Lombardi, Tomislav Longinovic, Karl Lyden, Artem Magun, Radim Marada, Françoise Mayerova, Adam Mazur, Viktor Misiano, Lubomir Mlcoch, JY Moon, Vlad Morariu, Sir Thomas More, Julia Moritz, Chantal Mouffe, Cristian Gomez Moya, Kamil Nabelek, Monica Narula - Raqs
Media Collective, Publius Ovidius Naso, Ania Nicinska, Arno Victor Nielsen, Boris Ondreicka, Anatolij Osmolovskij, Milan Otahal, Martina Pachmanova, Livia Pancu, Jiri Pehe, Georges Perec, Lia Perjovschi, Natasa Petresin-Bachelez, Miloslav Petrusek, Miroslav Petricek, Francois Piron, Sylva Polakova, Tomas Pospiszyl, Jiri Priban, Quentin Reed, Gabriella Ricciardi, Teresa Riccardi, Petr Robejsek, Joaquiín Barriendos Rodriguez, Lukasz Ronduda, Sergio Rubira, Jacques Rupnik, Marco Scotinini, Keiko Sei, Jan Sokol, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Yannis Stavrakakis, Mladen Stilinovic, Jiri Suk, Jiri Sevcik, Milan Simecka, Martin Skabraha, Zdislav Sulc, Marcel Tomasek, Igor Tomes, Juan Valentini, Vassilis Vamvakas, Zdenek Vasicek, Vangelis Vlahos, Raluca Voinea, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Wolfgang Welsch, Haegue Yang, Milan Zeleny, Magdalena Ziolkowska, Slavoj Zizek

Graphic design: Adéla Svobodová
Edition size: 2000 copies

GROUP AND SOLO EXHIBITION
Monument to Transformation  *2006
Installation Model - Fragment  # 1, tranzit – Auditorium, Stage, Backstage, an exhibition in 32 acts, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 2006
Installation Model - Fragment  # 2, Sociéte secret, le Plateau, Paris, 2007
Installation Model - Fragment  # 3, Zbyněk Baladrán, Tabulka, Atrium, Moravská Galerie v Brně, Brno, 2007
Installation Model - Fragment  # 4, Synonyma, Index, Stockholm, 2007
Installation Model - Fragment  # 5, Prague Biennale 3, Karlin Hall, Prague, 2007
Installation Model – Fragment  # 6, Labour Day, Labor, Budapest, Hungary, 2008
Installation model – fragment  # 7, Communism Never Happened / Vocabulary, 2008
                                                   tranzit workshops, Bratislava, SK
Installation model – fragment  # 8, International Biennial of Contemporary Art
                                                   Gyumri, 2008, Armenia
Installation model – Permanent installation, /2007 -2009/ tranzitdisplay resource center, contemporary art, Prague, CZ
Final exhibition – Monument to Transformation, /28.5. – 30.8.09/ City gallery Prague
Exhibition Monument to Transformation , Centre for Visual Introspection, 16 Biserica Enei.Str, district 1, Bucharest, RO  /30.9 – 13.11.2009/