After

31th August, 2019 … from that moment the way I look at the world changed. Everything has changed. Maria’s untimely death, her decision to end her own life, is a distinct cut, a sharp delineation of the before and after.      

 After, as the time slowly passed, I cautiously began to browse through the photographic archive and the scores of material gathered from trips, location scouting and filming together. In the last years we had visited various research centres and scientific institutes, and started to prepare and shoot the film Letopis. It was to be our film.       

 The excursion into our past life through the archive happened in various stages, lurching from an inability to bring myself to open the files, to obsessive periods in which I could do nothing other than continuously browse through the multitude of images, re-visiting the years, months and days spent together.  

Hidden contexts and threads I had not perceived before began to emerge and I started to link them. My aim was not to reconstruct our life but rather saw it as an expression of my desire to capture how the before transcends the after. And how even highly anticipated events always finds you unprepared.

Martin Kollar (1971) Born in Zilina in Czechoslovakia (now Slovak Republic), studied at the Academy of Performing Arts Bratislava, the Film faculty, camera department. He has been working as a freelance photographer and cinematographer since he graduated there. He has received several grants and awards, including the Prix Elysee and Oskar Barnack Award. His work has been exhibited across the world, including Brooklyn Museum, the Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, Tel Aviv museum of art and Musee Elysee (Lausanne).