Boots, Hats, and Harmonicas

October 19, 2025

We finally come to the conclusion of this journey. I have been silent these past days for obvious reasons, still somewhat trying to process the aftershocks of the police shenanigans, and, I have departed back home. I am driving, so right now I do not type this in Slovakia — is this cheating? — but in Lithuania. But I certainly refuse to allow the cops to have the last word. What’s the saying, don’t let the bastards keep you down? If it’s not, it should be and that’s precisely what I’m taking to heart. Because what I have got up to this past month is far more interesting and exciting then a bunch of thugs in face masks.

Somehow every one of us is in a distinctly awkward pose. Apropos!

Reflecting back, perhaps it is naive to think of Slovakia as being wholly severed from its fairly recent and grim past; I certainly have never believed in a utopian idyll that some presume to exist in the former-Bloc, and yet my experiences with all kinds of people here have at least suggested that while that long and dark winter may not be over, there is change afoot. And that’s and Dušan where I want to leave this dispatch, not on the expression of state power (and that is, frankly, what I believe happened: politics and power and the fixing of a status quo in opposition to a different kind of life as suggested through art and culture) but on those who work in opposition and active resistance against those denigrating forces.

The work I made here was not possible alone. And I believe it was made precisely because of this will and desire for change, to shift the political winds once and for all and deny the decay and corruption that is invading throughout not just in Slovakia but elsewhere (looking at you, USA). The people I met and worked with refuse to roll over. Or, as someone said to me yesterday, “shit our pants before the trouble even begins.” An apt expression. I have been remarkably impressed with the commitment and, frankly, love, that those I’ve come into contact with here have for their city. It’s a small town, and like small towns everywhere, usually become secondary to the opportunities that lie in wait elsewhere. Bratislava and Prague are the local heroes in this region, and yet many have chosen to stay and make something of what’s right here. There are architects and designers and photographers and filmmakers and musicians and all other forms of artistic actions happening in Trenčín, at what seems to be in a much more rich vein than other cities I have come across.

Of course, the obvious culprit is that Trenčín is the European Capital of Culture for 2026 and that opens up all kinds of opportunities for a local network to step into and flourish. And yet I propose a slightly different version of events. Trenčín is the European Capital of Culture because of those that are already here: their determination and commitment to the city is what made that bid process possible and now they get to reap the rewards of having a relationship to such a large enterprise. And yet, there are also many who are operating outside of that cultural behemoth, who will continue to do their work. So in some sense, the European Capital of Culture is both a symptom and a cause, a natural expression of what is already happening in Trenčín. And yet I have no doubt that what’s happening today would occur regardless of the success of Trenčín 2026 or not.

I, of course, am a byproduct of that commitment, and for that I am thankful for without those who made that bid, included me (looking at you, Olja) and then took up arms with the Temporary Seeing Section. When I worked for Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture (name drop) I remember he said once that he set up his studio “to allow inspiration for others.” I have never let that idea drop from my brain, and in some regard the Bureau of Operational Landscapes is set up to mimic that approach. What I mean is that as artists or photographers or whatever we are that our names should really be signed: Donald Weber, et al. That it is always a collaborative process regardless of how singular your genius is. For the last time I will once again invoke Robert Smithson (perhaps this is counter-intuitive to where I’m heading with this paragraph, the dissolution of artistic ego) who was always critical of the modernist conception of the artistic obsession of self-expression and permanence. He noted that the artist’s ego is just one of the many processes in the engagement of art, no more important that the erosion, sedimentation, crystallization — all of the are co-producers of form and the artist is just one agent among many that shape the work. He called this the “dematerialization of art” and something that I have started to advocate.

Think of the links and relations in the making of an artwork and while there might be a central figure, that figure is always supported and tested and in collaboration with others. It is no different than my time in Trenčín. From Olja’s friendship in the bowels of a Zagreb nightclub to this very moment, she has been an integral part of this work. Alexander and Pepe are as orange as I am with the seeing platform, while Jana and Andrej and the Žovinec Brothers and Martin are vital to everything else. Of course there is the bureaucratic structure of the European Capital of Culture that enabled this work — and as you have come to read the aesthetics of administration is something I can never peel away from — and even the mechanic that put new tires on my car or my friends abroad who listened to me discussing whatever it was that I was doing, and of course you who are reading the words. It’s all an entangled mess and that’s the way I like it.

Where does authorship start and where does it end? This is a work that is indelibly linked to the Temporary in all its various manifestations. To be temporary is to be inclusive of forever changing dynamics, an enfolding of a polyphonic spree of stories and memories that constantly shape and change. It is in opposition to the fixing forces of the state and to official structures of power that prefer the picturesque and the historical, to limit discourse and to be its primary shaper.

The Temporary is not a weakness at all, but rather I like to see it as a stance that we take against the frozen and finished, it is about being in motion and keeping the work, and ourselves, unfinished. And to do so, we need to find the right people to help make that happen. And in Trenčín, I have found that.