One year in a dominican convent in Sudetenland: Religious community in a post-atheistic and post-secular situation
Abstract
This chapter analyses the problematic search for the meaning of existence in the tiny Dominican community in the middle of a post-Christian society and in a place where war and post-war memory is playing an ambivalent role in the daily lives of the inhabitants. It utilizes a collection of 1,618 photographs taken between September 2015 and September 2017, by a lay friar of the community, Simon K.
Hlavaty, OP and publicly displayed as a kind of chronicle of the life of this Dominican community and the parish. The photographs, displayed as the chronicle of the life of the convents, create a discourse which highlights some specific themes such as cyclicity, agency of the place, marginality, backstage perspective.
Marginality is a kind of sympathetic feature of the images-marginality in the sense of importance given to the small, quotidian, unspectacular, unproductive or non-representative. Marginal is the place itself, marginal are the sides from which the author pictures the place.