The six year old son of a friend says: My mother comes from a country that doesn‘t exist anymore. A simple phrase that made me think. This concerns some European countries. States like (their) languages and cultural interaction are based on agreements and conventions. A state as a shared organism is a relatively recent idea in humanity’s history. And its requirements and conditions, as well as the State itself, are timeless in their appearance only.
Within the work Les Anciens Premiers some states have been chosen as examples. They existed in the 20th century and were members of the Warsaw Pack in the Cold War era: German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. By the portraits of the rulers as representatives of their states I manufactured some history wheels on which, in the shape early cinematography or fortune wheels, the faces of those rulers alternate.

2013