Weary of the Sun

The latest series by Slovak photographer Andrej Balco is a visual reflection on Medzibodrožie – a distinctive landscape situated in the lowest-lying part of eastern Slovakia, in the southern Zemplín region. The winding axis of the area explored, approximately fifteen kilometres long, is formed by the Bodrog – a river that flows through two countries, a river without a source, a river that is tranquil, fan-shaped, prone to flooding and to drying up. It does not represent a trajectory of wild energy for this landscape. Rather, it seems to reflect the slowed pulse of the parched region through which it meanders like a silver thread in a faded carpet.

The languid character of the environment is reflected, in a peculiar way, in the photographic process itself, which at times appears deliberately apathetic. Balco’s artistic language is essentially rooted in documentary photography – in the immediacy of the photographic image – yet his pictures are full of motionless events. Following his recent photographic essays on the Žitný Ostrov region, Bratislava, and Slovak satellite towns, it becomes clear that what truly interests him about social reality is its periphery. The seemingly marginal, passive, unattractive, and easily overlooked. It makes no difference whether he photographs in a large city, a small village, indoors, or in the landscape. His gaze remains equally penetrating and precise. And it is precisely this way of looking that turns its attention to lethargy as something fundamental, presenting it to us as a possible essence of life.

Weary of the Sun. The motif of insurmountable exhaustion permeates the series on several levels. On the one hand, we sense the exhaustion brought on by a hot summer, whose blazing heat gradually transforms stagnant river branches and everything capable of sustaining life around them into a barren wasteland. Signs fade, crack, and weather away; cars and houses gradually become overgrown, as if in Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom. Once-functional spaces are transformed into melancholic ruins filled with layers of useless objects, old posters, stuffed animals… Many of these objects point towards stories from the distant past. In the photographs, they do not appear in their own right, but as traces of something faded – as the absence of something that passed long ago.

On the other hand, the series also speaks of a deeper, inner fatigue among the local inhabitants, who, under difficult social and economic conditions, often lead highly subdued lives reduced to activities around the house and garden. A closer look at the photographs reveals that almost all movement has disappeared from the reality depicted in them. Human figures and animals stand rigidly, sit, or lie around. Even snapshots seem less like fleeting moments than a kind of hibernation or a pensive contemplation of timelessness.

The moment captured in Andrej Balco’s photographs appears anything but decisive. Instead, it is miraculously stretched into the exhausting persistence of a state. His images thus become models of the world.

Lucia L. Fišerová