:HISTORY
THE FILM
  SYNOPSIS (LONG)
  SYNOPSIS (SHORT)
  DIRECTOR STATMENTS

BACKROUND INFOS
  MUSIC
  HISTORY
  RUTHENIA
  FAMILY MUSEUM
  EMIGRATION
HISTORY

Yet I am from Nowhere shows these two totally different worlds to be closely linked ever since Julia Warhola, Andy's mother, emigrated to the United States in the 1920's. The film tells the story of the Warhols ploughing the fields of the kolkhoz while Andy made colorful screen prints of soup cans, dollar signs, and Marilyn Monroe. It also gives us an idea of the role this old world culture played for the art of Andy Warhol, whose works of Pop Art became synonimous not only for an artistic, but also for a social departure of the new world. Above all the film submerges us into the willful atmosphere of Eastern Slovakia, where time seems to have come to a standstill, and a small forgotten town not far from Miková is the home of the only museum in all of Europe entirely dedicated to Andy Warhol.

 

 

The self-styled artistic product of a certain Andrijku Warhola's metamorphosis into Andy Warhol is only an invisible central theme connecting these two worlds, while the main emphasis of the film rests on his weirdly droll relatives and the inhabitants of the small village of Miková.

After the death of Andy Warhol the tiny village for a short time enjoyed the limelight of international attention, and almost everybody here had the pleasure of his or her ‚fifteen minutes of fame', when TV-crews and journalists from various countries were all over the place. A strange Warhol-fever took hold of most anybody, as consciousness of the celebrated son spread. Everyone reached out for a share of the fame, and all of a sudden relatives of Warhol made up the entire village population.
In a rather strange fashion his art became integrated into quotidian life, as if this kind of cultural annexation was the most ordinary thing on earth. The glaring wave of Pop Art washed over the drab diaspora of the Slovakian Carpathians. Handcrafted items of bizarre appearance integrated the Warholian touch or his image, be it on clay tiles picturing soup cans or pillowcases embroidered with his motifs. With the movingly staged act of business in devotional objects Miková has recaptured its Andrijku by storm.

(C) 2002 by kleinFISCH