13 May 2017
On Saturday, hundreds of people interested in architecture came to Bubny Station as part of 2017 Open House Prague, where they could hear blind Jewish singer Kataryna Kolcová or could dance on the station platform to the sounds of Romani band Terne Čhave as part of the Memorial of Silence’s first event of the 2017 season. The theme of this year’s cultural program is based on one section of the memorial’s future permanent exhibition – the question of “otherness” past and present.
The platform at Bubny Station became a stage for artists from cultural or national groups that would have been excluded from the Nazi vision of the future… Romani moderator Renata Berkyová shared her experience and that of the performers with engaging in dialogue across skin color and dialect. Blind Jewish-Ukrainian singer Kataryna Kolcová recalled her experience with bureaucratic red tape when she tried to take care of a formality for her studies and was asked if she wanted a license for begging. The members of the Romani band Terne Čhave literally brought hundreds of “travelers” on the platform to their feet.
The weekend’s atmosphere at Bubny Station was given an unusual flavor by citations from Patrik Ouředník’s Europeana:
“Your place is not among us. You fall into one of the following categories: UNNUTZE ESSER. Useless mouths to feed. Based on the concepts of usefulness, or rather uselessness and food: useless mouths to feed. You eat and eat, stuffing and gorging yourself without contributing the energy gained from the intake of food back into socially beneficial work.
BALASTEXISTENZEN. Human ballast. From the old German word ballast, meaning encumbrance, burden, and the word existenz (“life”), if this word is even applicable in your case. You are a burden on society, deadweight, a dead fetus in its mother’s body. You will surely understand that, if the balloon of the present is to rise off the ground and reach the heights of the future, then it must get rid of any excess burden.
LEERE MENSCHENHÜLSEN. Empty human shells. Menschen – people; leer – empty, without content; and hülsen – shell, hull. You are beings without essence. Shells without fruit, a hull containing emptiness, walking nothings, form without content, a malignant trick of nature. You are neither human nor animal. You are nothing.”