A memory is full of surprises but also full of peculiar paradoxes. For example, we don't know what we do remember. We know the memory is larger than we are actually aware of. And this goes for our personal memory too, which is not only a guarantee but a condition of our own identities. We are who we are because we remember what we lived through and how. We are who we are because we remember ourselves and because in every moment we return to ourselves through our memories. While remembering though we can be surprised by finding memories we experienced only partly or perhaps never. Aside from our personal memory there is undoubtedly a collective memory too. And between those two there is a special part that contains very private recollections of things we partly or never lived through, for example childhood memories, or things and events conveyed by someone else. That would include a generational memory whose borders are vague, traces that we don't know by whom they were left there. Whether it was the time we lived in or lives and recollections of those who were close to us and who shared or still share their memories with us or the traces that were imprinted on our mind from the outside, but in the same time from the inside too, perhaps those parts of others’ destinies that have influenced us greatly, bits and pieces stubbornly remaining in our memories, demanding we recall them because they rely on us that we won't let them be forgotten. And by digging out those buried memories, which we often have no idea where they came from, we become aware of ourselves.
One big paradox of a memory is that it's a place of oblivion as well. Memory isn't flawless nor is it perfect and capable of perfectly reliving our past. But then would the past cease to exist. A memory is very selective, choosing what to preserve. That is why remembering isn't only a passive reproduction of the past, it's an act that gives our past a purpose. We remember only things we consider important or at least important to us but those are only as significant as we reckon them to be. The memory itself is a place where we distinguish important from unimportant, place where the past has a meaning it can't have on its own.
Without a memory the past is forgotten as soon as it ceased to be the present. The memory holds it, retains it, saves it but not like in a museum. It gives the past a new life in the present as something that shapes and influences the present. This simple definition gets complicated when we recall that memory however collective, generational or otherwise noncommittal it may be is in the first place personal and private, belonging to each one of us. That means that all of us are responsible for the existence of the past things but in the same time each one of us is as well and in a quite special and personal way too.
Our personal memory is a guarantee that the past won't be forgotten and if the collective memory exists and if the history exists it's only because of one man';s will not to forget this or that, a will to remember and to make things he remembers and which are important to him a part of his present. When we say that something doesn't want to be forgotten it really means that there is someone who doesn't want it forgotten.
Bára Mrázková and Filip Láb are remembering just these kinds of traces that have been left in their memories by the era that their generation has encountered at its end. Their project is immensely original though because despite this they decided to rely above all on the personal memories - their own but also the ones of their peers with whom they are connected by that very experience-inexperience. They decided to depend upon deeply buried bits and pieces of memories, to relive them by reminiscing, to go back to the places where the past happened and to chase similar traces in the minds of others. To make the others recall even the slightest details from their personal memories but not for the sake of knowing what was the past really like. They interpret the past's character exclusively from the way it had marked them and the others that share their generational memory. What makes their project original is the fact that they believe the half-buried shreds of the past the most. And that they aren't trying to restore the past. They are trying to show that this era that they have lived through mostly through someone else's memories is nevertheless theirs which is the very reason it mustn't be forgotten. That is their personal goal because they are taking journey to the traces of the past for themselves out of their own will, not to achieve impersonal reconstruction of the past in the end. Then is even that strange and in fact paradox joining of photography and memory understandable. You can't take a photograph of the past and a memory isn't designed to remember the present. But if you put these two together you get something that is hard to describe with just one word. The photograph of a memory, personal testimony about history, whose image is diffracted on the prism of a memory, which is necessarily fragmented but nevertheless so intensive it can't be forgotten. Because the photograph almost flauntingly says: "This is the present."

Doc. Miroslav Petrícek, Dr.