Interview with Lucia Nimcova at Tone Glow

Lucia Nimcová is a Slovak multimedia visual artist who descends from the small Rusyn minority based in the East Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, Poland, and her home country. Growing up, she wasn’t allowed to speak the Rusyn language. This prohibition began a lifelong fascination with the forbidden, one she’s documented through dozens of photography and film projects over the past 20 years. In 2014, she began traveling to the Ukrainian side of the Carpathians with the sound artist Sholto Dobie. They went with the vague goal of creating a Ruthyn folk opera by documenting khroniky, the story-songs Nimcová had heard her parents and grandparents sing growing up—and more specifically potka (vagina songs), a raunchy subgenre containing coded language with which women could communicate secretly in the presence of men. Three summers of patient work yielded a film and an album, 2016’s Bajka (fable) and 2021’s DILO (work), respectively.