Lonely Planet Trnávka by Lenka L. Lukačovičová, begun in 2020 in Trnávka—a Bratislava district about five kilometers from the city center—documents the photographer’s own neighborhood as it shifts through redevelopment, tracking daily life in a place with few conventional tourist landmarks.
Instead of approaching Trnávka as a destination, Lukačovičová photographs it as a lived environment and asks what is preserved, and what is erased, when peripheral districts are reshaped by urbanization and gentrification. Historically, the area includes interwar worker housing such as the Masaryk colony and a rural-urban layout marked by fire-access lanes, yards, fences, and irregular boundaries. These conditions have supported a local identity that often resists outside planning ideals; Lukačovičová frames today’s construction boom as part of that longer tension between imposed models and everyday use. The title’s reference to a travel-guide brand underscores the project’s central inversion: it builds a "guide" out of ordinary details rather than monuments.
The photographs come from routine movement—walking, errands, the commute to kindergarten—and focus on moments that would not register as events. Lukačovičová isolates small arrangements and vernacular signs. Framing often stays close to interspaces and street edges, where temporary objects and minor repairs accumulate into a record of how people inhabit the area. Ambient daylight and a snapshot-like tempo keep the scenes anchored in the time of the walk, while the repeated return to changing sites marks the neighborhood’s accelerating transformation.
Lukačovičová’s broader practice—across photography, installation, and performance—has been recognized through awards including Different Worlds (2021) and the Novum Foundation (2022). In 2024, the project appeared within the 34th Month of Photography Bratislava through festival programming around Lonely Planet Trnávka and a related exhibition abroad at the Slovak Institute in Vienna organized in cooperation with the Central European House of Photography. In December 2025, a jury in Bratislava also awarded Lukačovičová the national title Fotografka roka (Photographer of the Year) for 2025.
