"I think we are living in limbo. We are not living in the past, we are not living in the future; we are living in between" Steve McQueen, British video artist.

Rahova is a large housing estate (180,000 inhabitants) on the outskirts of Bucharest. In David Možný’s video, its heavy-sized architecture of eight-storey blocks becomes the subject of the deconstruction and questioning of the reality. The buildings become a background for an apocalyptic movie in which it’s not quite clear whether cataclysm is yet to happen, or has already taken place. David Možný employs the same strategy he used in his previous videos. He chooses a specific environment, such as a department store, living rooms as shown in lifestyle magazines, i.e. environment that links banality and universality. It’s only the surface of these environments that he is interested in, the way they appear, and that serves him as a platform for developing his stories.

The Rahova video is based on real photos of the kind that illustrate what Jean Baudrillard said about photography in The Perfect Crime: “Every photographed object is a trace left behind after everything else has disappeared” – that is, after the disappearance of all aspects and comments, such as the personal, social and cultural context of what is in the viewfinder. If this thin membrane of frozen time is broken by reattaching time to it (manipulating the photo in the computer), the motion pictures take another direction. They begin to forge the reality of their own fiction, the reality of a waiting room or limbo. The author is playing with the idea that the peripetia of the waiting room are unstable to the extent we cannot rely on them.

František Kowolowski