"Shooting into the Tatras": Former military area conceals unusual painting
Javorina used to be the largest Czechoslovak military area.
Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Slovak artist and sculptor Radovan Čerevka decided on an artistic intervention in the former Javorina military zone in eastern Slovakia.
The final result? A short film and a reconstructed painting of the Tatra mountain peaks on a wall destroyed by gun shots. In the past, the wall use to serve soldiers.
The Javorina area was once the largest Czechoslovak military district and a training area where Soviet soldiers also operated.
Radovan Čerevka, who works at the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice, calls his intervention in the former military zone a "healing" ritual, which he considers important during the war in Ukraine. The ritual consisted of several days of restoring the painting by an unknown soldier on the training wall.
"Shooting a gun into the High Tatras could have given strange feelings to someone," Čerevka told the Korzár website.
Visual aid
According to the artist, few people know about this work of art on a dilapidated building. However, Čerevka said that at least the locals are aware of it.
He restored the wall in the autumn of 2022, the final post-production of his film taking place in 2023 as part of the project. According to the artist, the unknown soldier must have painted the mountaintops on the wall in the 1980s or the early 1990s.
"It might have been a visual aid for shooting," he mused.
Detailed travel guide to the Tatras introduces you to the whole region around the Tatra mountains, including attractions on the Polish side.
Čerevka sees the restoration of the work as a symbolic healing of the "wounds" after shooting at the building, despite the fact that the painting had to be created precisely for the purpose of being shot at.
"We left some parts of the wall in their original form, which actually corresponds to the restoration concept, when some layers are left exposed."
According to the artist, this happens, for example, in Western Europe, where some parts of buildings destroyed during the Second World War remain in their original form during restoration.
Ecotourism
During the preparation of the project, the artist walked around a considerable part of Javorina. He remains impressed by the area.
"There are dilapidated buildings and the landscape is overgrown," he said.
Logging was limited in Javorina. For many years, nature lived as it wanted, co-existing with occasional explosions or occasional fuel contamination of the soil, but otherwise undisturbed, Čerevka said. At the same time, the place bears signs of military nostalgia for him.
According to the artist, Javorina could have been used for tourism. He mentions the Czech Republic, where ecotourism is developed in former military locations. For example, visitors can ride on a military transporter in these Czech locations.
"Compared to this kind of entrepreneurship and the revitalisation of the territory in such a commercial way, I perceive that the use of Javorina has no concept," said the artist.
However, he said that it is not his task to design the potential use of the site.
"Instead, I reflect on the things that happen there."
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