OFLUXO

Early access to the reenactment of the fates and events that took place at the spot where the fossilized historical memory built multi-layered conglomerate formations.The prehistoric and medieval fortified settlement of Kozel stood here, the subsoil of which was broken up by limestone mining and a quarry called Alkazar was subsequently created. Tunnels dug into the rocks were to be occupied by an unfinished Wolfenstein-like assembly plant for Nazi missile parts but in the end, the rock corridors were infested with the first radioactive waste repository in Czechoslovakia. Barrels filled with radioactive waste were later poured with concrete to hold off glances of curious cavers.

Different levels of temporality: the age of the rocks, feudal fortifications, fossil-capitalist mining of “mineral wealth”, Nazi technology, and the nuclear-powered scientific and technological revolution in the name of Marxism-Leninism. In addition, hikers, bouldering and tourism. The exhibition was created in a similarly complex way: a multi-level collaboration influenced by the environment and precaution of a pandemic era, combining a friendly trip into cultivated nature with CGI post-production, recycling of the possible and remote proxy installation.

We do not try to realize our own narratives in a place full of stories, but we try to establish a procedure known from contemporary video games: to follow the procedures of “environmental storytelling”, where the narrator is the environment and its history, or “lore”, or  story background, context and all elements, which complement the main story in order to create a believable world with its own habits and events independent of the player’s presence and activities.

In the case of the rocky promontory above the Berounka River, perhaps such an attitude will allow us to look from above in view of the impossibility of escaping the romantic clichés in designing the landscape of open game worlds. To trace past events and try to determine the ways in which ideas can be expressed not only through text and image, but to engage them in the game mechanisms that themselves play out the environment. To follow a story not only through words and scenes, but to create it by the power of spatial narration, in which stories are embedded within the scene.