Denisa Svach

Smoking a cigarette, as the act itself, has become a source of inspiration for many projects for me. It is traditionally used as a film symbol, but I have tried to explore how different media such as installation or performance can elaborate on it. This ritual requires a certain movement of the body in the same sequence. The smokers behave very naturally, but one can notice their individuality in different approaches to the different parts of this ritual. I have observed and documented the smokers. My aim was to create as accurate description of each person's individual approach to smoking and capture the authenticity of their personal approach to it. For several years I also took pictures of my own cigarettes that I smoke. I used these photos for the performance *In The Heat Of 7' (*2017).

In the work Pack a Day (2014), I focused on cigarette packs. At the beginning, I collected all the boxes. On some of the boxes, I have found various handwritten messages forgotten cigarettes, papers, or tickets. However, my main focus was on the boxes from one particular person, my father. He used to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. He created this habit to control his consumption and regulate how much he smokes. The particular consistency of this habit has inspired me to create a calendar from each box that he smoked every day.

Each sheet of paper is made from a single cigarette pack, and to make my father's "a pack a day" rule clear, each page has a date stamped on it. I created the paper using the carpet technique, which really achieved the effect of each paper being made from just one cigarette box. Depending on which box I used, the paper is a slightly different color and texture.

(text for One-day edition, Denisa Švachová, 2022)