Lucie Marsikova
Whilst working on this project, I realised more than ever before how different all my friends are to each other, to me. They all represent a unique personality with a special story. At some moment in their life, their life story intersected with mine and thus our story started. Yet, at the same time, I think about my parents growing up under the communist regime in a locked country and believe that the dynamics of friendship in our everyday life are much more influenced by global politics than we would ever expect them to be. It is not only the international economy that deems some of us to live in a country where the value of a currency is higher than elsewhere. It impacts our options in terms of education, in which environment the majority of the relationships I portray happened. Furthermore, leaving its native country to enter a university abroad is not only a question of the price but also of the politics of movement and their impact on the power of our passports. This, however, does not only cover the political situation of the region we are coming from. It again translates into a monetary affair, for instance in terms of the fees for overseas students being significantly higher, without mentioning the visa time and money demanding process. Therefore, our encounters with people we meet and built relationships with are to a significant extent conditioned by global politics.
At the same time, these relationships define who we are, for I believe they allow vital exchanges to happen; exchanges of words, gifts, pieces of ourselves, but also our worlds. My friends allowed me to have a peep into their reality and vice versa, allowing their stories to accompany me every day. As a result, many things suddenly gained meaning, whereas otherwise they would have gone unnoticed in my everyday life, dismissed as ephemera. For instance, I could have learnt how privileged I have been to be born as a woman in Central Europe while at the same time understand better the intricate nature of being a woman through the experiences of my friends.
This is why I decided to literary portray my friends in their uniqueness and interchangeability. The simple representation of the portray is deliberate because regardless of the numerous hours we have spent talking and sharing, I will always be able to understand only a segment of their selves. The use of different colours aims at emphasizing, that a segment is enough to gain a more diverse and colourful vision of the world. The minimalist representation of the portrays could, however, fail in conveying the richness of these friendships, which is why I noted their names, the country of their origin and the year and place we met. These data are witnessing the presence of global politics since they confirm that relationships happen in time in space, which as mentioned above are not simply circumstantial. While the black colour of the background could represent the mental space of my mind where I accommodate and cherish these relationships, it also significantly increases the contrast, which underlines the multitude of differences. A step closer, or a zoom-in in our times, might be required to read the text, which embodies the border between the physical-public part of a relationship and the mental- private nature of it.
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