Vladimír Kokolia

“I had an exhibition, it was held by the gallery of the town council of the Socialist Youth Union in Karlova Street. Those were the paradoxes of time that I could exhibit my work there. Allegedly, someone saw the shape of the Soviet Union on one drawing. They thought it looked like a gulag and there were worms in it. Or it was the shape of Siberia. I didn’t understand it. Those censors had a good eye for this. We knew that people were interested in our things. That was for sure. I submitted hundreds of drawings for the exhibition, around four hundred. They were banned from the exhibition but I got to know only towars the end that the drawings were snatched, that the censor didn’t let them there.”

"Dad had a friend who was… by the secret police at the beginning of the 1960’s. Dad told him that to get out of there, he should be… To tell them a lot of nonsense. It indeed did work. After about two years of testing, they stopped being interested. He kept bringing gifts to dad then, he was grateful that dad saved his life in that sense of living. I guess that I would do this unwittingly, that I’d be just trying hard. But it was apparent for me that one wakes up and there’s the dirty membrane of normalisation on it. Everything is as if covered by a layer of oil or plastic and from time to time, this layer stretches somewhere far there. It appears as if there could be a break. We were finely attuned to this and recognised it instantly. One day, one could say something and a day after, it was not possible any more. The whole nation had very sensitive perception of what exactly was permitted and when.”