Dream About Freedom

The exhibition as a contribution to the story of the BZVIL Design Studio

The Ružomberok Cotton Factory was the largest textile factory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the pride of light industry in Czechoslovakia. In the era of socialism, they exported production to the Comecon countries, but also to the west to Germany and Scandinavia. In 1994, the textile factory was privatized, changed owners and name several times, and in 2006 it went bankrupt. With the gradual disappearance of production, the more than a hundred years of textile history of the city ended.

Undoubtedly, the artists who designed the patterns also had a share in the success of the factory. From 1958, a design studio operated in the "cotton factory", in which secondary school artists initially worked as designers of textile designs. Gradually, however, students and graduates of art schools became more and more involved in its activities, who often completed their studies with scholarship support from cotton factories. Among the first were academic painters Ján Havrila and briefly Milan Gromnica and Ján Kudlička.

The exhibition Designers presents the work of five authors who gradually worked in the textile factory from the second half of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s: Ján Havrila, Danica Doležalová Bagel, Júlia Sabová, Jozef Bajus, Pavol Rusko. They have worked for BZVIL internally or externally, some of them after graduating from the Secondary Industrial School of Textile in Ružomberok or the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Bratislava, during their studies at university or immediately after graduation. Both Bajus and Rusko realized a collection of dress patterns for BZVIL as their diploma thesis at the AFAD.

The exhibition presents selected authors through original designs of designs, which it puts in context with their free authorial work. It connects the past and the present in the work of these artists and is also a reflection on whether their textile work in the field of design designs is organically related to free creation, or whether it is only episodic and irrelevant for free creation. At the same time, the exhibition also presents other designs realized in BZVIL, e.g. textile design based on the work of Ľudovít Fulla.

The exhibition includes photographic and film documents related to BZVIL, the functioning and story of the design studio. In addition to the documentary film Women Designers (directed by P. Záchenský, 1987), there is also a new documentary BZVIL Design Studio (screenplay by Z. Gažíková, directed by M. Vašicová, 2023) with testimonies of witnesses from the design studio; from the first heads of the studio to contemporary professional artists with the experience of the BZVIL textile designer. Martin Popovič's photographs from 2008 – 2016, capturing the gradual disintegration of the building and the sad fate of the design studio's archive, are a happy end to a once successful story.

With the exhibition, we tried to bring back into play a topic that is a bit unfinished in Ružomberok. Despite the fact that the textile industry played a big role in the life of this city, its end was inglorious. For example, the archive of the design studio fell apart along with the factory. In the collection of the Slovak muse of design in Bratislava, there is only a minimal, disparate and therefore unrepresentative torso. This exhibition and its accompanying activities therefore also have the ambition to encourage especially former designers, who may still keep their designs at home, like some of the exhibiting artists, to try to complete the missing puzzle together and create a more complete picture of the best years of cotton mills.

(ZG)