Published in / Katarína Poliačiková: DEŇ / DAY
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Who knows you better than someone who takes care of you? After a few years, this kind of relationship can reach a level of intimacy others can only dream of. For example, when a restorer spends months or even years working on one painting, he or she gets to know every inch of it by heart, every little fold of the drapery, even the smallest crack in the polish.
Moving through space creates a different kind of awareness and intimacy: unlocking doors, turning the light on and off, cleaning. Those who are often invisible to the public, tune in with the palace through their own rhythms of taking care of it. Ensuring security, tidiness, taking care of the plants.
Their precise and confident movements in the space show an intimate knowledge of every fragment: how to open antique window sills, which wooden slab creaks when you step on it, which face in the paintings has the most intense stare that keeps following you across the room, how to insert the old key into the lock. They know the familiar silence when no one is around, the echo of their own footsteps, the low cracking of the wood as the time chews away on it.
The rituals of care have their own choreography, intensity, a way of taking place in a never-ending cycle.
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(Translated from Slovak by Barbora Tomíková)