Wander Years of Milan Adamčiak 1962…
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- Wander Years of Milan Adamčiak 1962…
- Vandrovné roky Milana Adamčiaka 1962…
- 1962-early 90ties
- personally used railway tickets on paper, 4 pieces
- 29,6 × 41,6 cm
Milan Adamčiak systematically stored objects documenting his life’s events. Commonplace discards from how he lived would be collated, picked over, and sorted into types, then archived in separate boxes, receptacles, or drawers. He filed away packets from cigarettes he’d smoked, envelopes from letters he’d received, and tapped his ashes into the same bottle all year. Thus he archived the traces of his own existence. One material he systematically laid by were pasteboard Edmondson railway tickets he’d used, the little cards (57 × 30.5 × 0.8 mm) often used as souvenirs. His works from the cycle “Wander Years of Milan Adamčiak” have preserved remnants—today we would say data—of Adamčiak’s travels, a nostalgic memoir that also pins down and conserves the railway aesthetic. Ticket prices stayed identical for ten years, with each ticket bearing a pre-printed price, along with the points of boarding and disembarking, and the date of purchase embossed. The ticket type also shows whether the travel was by local or express train (the latter with a red middle stripe). Adamčiak’s one-way journeys bear one punch-hole from the conductor, round-trips two. Where double-checked by an inspector, the tickets were either signed or tick-marked in red pencil. Adamčiak would store his tickets as a memory of the travel over several decades; in the collages we can even see tickets from the early 1990s, when he and his children (Erik and Alenka) journeyed to cities in Slovakia during holidays. In individual collages the tickets are arranged variously, without any chronological scheme. After 1994, when Adamčiak composed the collages, we find no more pasteboard tickets. M.Mu.