You can return, but no one will be there.

Do you know who the offer in the title belongs to? Yes, you’re right to guess, dear audience. Only you have the possibility to return to a place where no one else will be besides you. This place originally existed at a time when everyone who cared for it as their home was still there. Do you know such a place too? Do you still return there, if you can? The space of ARTA Gallery is saturated with a past that was suppressed for a long time and has not yet been fully reconstructed. In the interwar period, it served as the background for a family whose fate can only be read with gaps. We thus find ourselves in an uncertain relationship to personal history, and it is precisely this uncertainty that becomes an essential condition—and recommendation—for how to enter this space. It is not complicated; we feel something similar on the threshold of any home. Each of our visits functions as a vibrating layer of memory, where the present intertwines with what has been interrupted. We visit someone somewhere, and memory awakens in the tension between what we know and what we no longer know. In encounters with others, something always remains unspoken—and this is true in art as well. This exhibition is the joint result of two artists whom I know to be capable of working on the principle of mutuality. In this project, they set out on a path where one can achieve an individual expression only through interaction and creative consideration. This is naturally connected to a deeper personal understanding. During their work for ARTA, I realized that both perceive handcrafted media and the concept of its placement as a unified reality. I observed how they conducted an inspiring dialogue about detail in relation to the whole, how they spoke about something that does not exist unless it can be jointly authorized. (Which is by no means a walk in the park.) I mentioned the notion of mutuality in artistic collaboration. What do we know about others, what do we consider important, and how can we understand it? Margarita Ivy. Her hometown of Zaporizhzhia is now a place affected by war, one that cannot be easily returned to. Her relationship to the past has undergone an unprecedentedly harsh transformation. What was once taken for granted has become uncertain. What was once unthinkable has become ordinary. Many memories are no longer accessible to Margarita. Bystrík Klčo. He comes from nearby Vrbové. He returns home, but with a different—at least more mature—experience. He perceives this as another opportunity to focus on his long-term theme: the social environment shaping the individual with all its consequences. Bystrík offers us a personal, critical, and empathetic perspective. I will not describe their joint work. I do not intend to write about specific casts, as they are, in a sense, untouchable. However, I would like to mention that I have long been interested in the imprint in art—for its paradoxical nature, where intense intimacy meets radical distance. The imprint is the center of time. It stood at the very beginning of art as understood by our civilization. The imprint was domesticated as a purely natural phenomenon, not limited only to the inorganic sphere. As one of the exhibited works suggests, birds also create imprints—they are capable of copying and imitating an unknown sound coming from the outside. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize the word empathy. Not as something self-evident, but as a threshold phenomenon that can easily be exhausted. Empathy does not lead us only toward others; it returns to us as a loop. That is why it is important to know that it is activated only under certain conditions—and when these are exceeded, empathy collapses. If we want to sustain memory and a relationship to places and situations that have meanwhile undergone radical change, it is necessary to consciously create these conditions. How much time, discomfort, and shared responsibility are we willing to bear so that empathy does not become a mere illusion—in art and in everyday life.