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On January 28, 2022, O:P celebrated the two-piece release of OBJECT:PRAHA II and OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II with a happening featuring over 30 locals from Žižkov.

“Why shouldn’t someone get tattooed during a poetry reading? Why couldn’t a brawl break out in which the opponents start kissing? Why not read poetry from slices of ham?”





What such principles – harking back to avant-garde cabarets and the happenings of the sixties – look like today could be seen on 28 January in the Kampus Hybernská gallery at the event Thought & Beat. The collective presented, on three screens at once, their second video OBJECT:PRAHA, a half-hour mapping of their activities (both videos are freely available on YouTube). The second highlight of the evening was the launch of a music-and-poetry album whose preparation, under the baton of Roksan Mendel, involved roughly twenty “Prague-based artists”. The album was created through collective improvisations with the aim of reviving Žižkov’s sounds and shouts, muted by the pandemic. The tracks can be heard, for example, on Spotify, but in Hybernská they were performed live, with a strong emphasis on the visual component.





One poet, when not speaking, was diligently working the mixing desk; another poured plastic beer over himself like a plant; some performers wandered around the space like abandoned molecules; a girl in a mask handed us slips of paper – mine read: “Poetry is under your tongue. And it bleeds a little.” The stage action was simultaneously duplicated by cameras onto screens that formed the gallery’s single exhibition. Over time the cluster of performers didn’t really change as much as condense, until everyone was producing some sort of sound. What stuck with me was the moment when a conductor hopped about between the musicians and poets, but no one followed her emphatic cues, as if she were pointlessly flapping her wings inside the chaos. No single person can give orders to the world; at most they can make a mistake, flash for a moment.

The uneven quality between individual performers didn’t matter at all. You could see that some had behind them demanding studies of jazz music, some were simply themselves in the here and now, some modelled themselves on Beat role-models, others glanced more towards Broadway, and yet another perceived Prague more in terms of a quasi-Berlin vibe.

The evening was a manifesto of creation open to everyone, creation whose aim was and is above all to bring together a cosmopolitan community. And it was precisely the view of foreigners on our capital city, with an emphasis on Žižkov, that I found most interesting.

Let us recall that Žižkov has been linked with artistic bohemia since the First Republic, when figures such as Franta Sauer, Jaroslav Hašek, the Longen and Neumann couples or Toyen roamed here. Somewhat unfairly, Žižkov has also been stuck with the label of a working-class district. More amusing are the attempts to proclaim it an independent republic. In the last decade it has grappled with strong gentrification – that is, the departure of original residents as the neighbourhood turns into a trendy quarter for tourists and entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, the myth of Žižkov as a centre of precaritised bohemia, in other words as Prague’s Montmartre, has become a brand used in adverts by the very people who are knowingly destroying that same Žižkov.





The foreigners around OBJECT:PARADISE, however, are not short-term tourists, nor do they come across as exchange students; rather, they are people who, for various life reasons, have decided to work and live here without necessarily mastering Czech. And in this cultural lostness they yearn for shared beauty.



Watching them, I felt a desire to pretend I didn’t understand Czech either, to live in my own country as a foreigner, to communicate in broken English – that new Esperanto – or just with signs and gestures. Alienated from the language of my parents, foreign even to the languages I was taught at school, and yet unable to understand the apes. Something truly close, these days, I would probably experience only in gestures of welcome, in a smile, maybe in a kiss. Perhaps I would first receive a punch and then a kiss from that same man. When I saw them in the gallery, I knew this land is not my home. And if in their performances they sealed references to some tradition, to some yesterday’s dream, what gripped me were the moments when that tradition didn’t fit them, when their graduation suit was tighter than their prom jacket, and when something in their performances burst out of life that had just crawled out of the new-century shell of exotic poses, out of the well-meant shells of our lives, and little by little shed from itself everything but the skin already rubbed raw.

- Ondřej Macl (July 2022)

Cast

About OBJECT:PRAHA II

See the film here

About OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II

OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II is the audio core of that same Žižkov moment. Recorded in 2021 during the happenings and studio sessions captured in OBJECT:PRAHA II, the album tries to press a living event onto wax.

Album credits

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Past Events : Anti-Climax

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Anti-Climax

"Welcome to an evening special, titled Anti-Climax by Tyko Say and Sandra Pasławska. For the next 30-45 minutes, you will watch the one-time premiere of a film. Its characters, setting, plot, conflict, and development will be entirely created by you. There is a pen and paper under your chair—we ask you to write what you see in the film.

After the premiere, the stories will be collected for future screenings of the film alongside your interpretations.

We thank you for your subjective experience. Out of respect for the performers, we ask you to stay seated in the gallery so that you may collectively observe the same happening."

See the film below

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Past Events

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OBJECT:SHOWCASE

July 13, 2022 with Adam Ritzke (PL)

October 1, 2022 with Vivana Druga (ROU)

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Momentument

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The Events

For the first event of the project, community members were invited to dress two large blank canvases with whatever tools and modes of expression they had access to. By the end of the evening, the two canvases were covered in paint, text, nutella, glass, money, prescription medicine, and other mixed-media to reveal a holistic piece of community motif and moment.

For the second event, the community brought empty picture frames and placed them on the canvases in areas that they thought should be seen. By the end of the evening, 26 picture frames were nailed to the canvases, each frame with their own subjective perspective.

For the final event, we exhibited these unique perspectives and removed the excess canvases. And, by the end of the night, the frames on the walls slowly began to disappear as each of the community members took back their perspective, leaving the project with their own memory of the whole.

The 26 framed pieces, now separated from the collective canvas, exist not alone, but differently in their new spaces—as we do, as we will, until we meet again, newly, in the momentument.

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The Film

Genre: Documentary, experimental
Runtime: 27:25
Format: Digital via VHS (PAL)
Aspect: 16:9
Colorspace: Color (PAL)
Sound: 5.1
Completion date: June 12, 2025

OBJECT:PRAHA V : Momentument is part of the annual OBJECT:PRAHA film series which aims to explore applications of the OBJECT:PARADISE Manifesto.

If you could paint a state of mind, would anyone else be able to understand it? And would that be art? Or just a moment?

Momentument is a short documentary of an experimental project in the expat/immigrant community of Prague. Filmed entirely on VHS, the film explores the Prague underground where no one is an artist outside of the immediate, imperfect moment. What emerges is equal parts documentary, installation, and urban poem--a study of public authorship, temporality, and the soft chaos of making things together.

Director’s statement:

Momentument is a film that not only captures the O:P Manifesto--perhaps better than any other films from the annual film series--but also contextualizes it in the place where it was born: Žižkov, a space where you’re allowed to be both a foreigner and a local.

It was a pleasure to work with so many artists and inspiring people for this project because it is them--our community--who brought the project and film to life.

Momentument is dedicated to anyone who was never given the opporunity to express themselves freely. This film is for the “bad” artists.

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Screening Dates

• 31.10.2025 @ Prague Microfestival (Prague, CZ)

Video mix by Sandra Pasławska
Video edited by Tyko Say
Camera by Sandra Pasławska & Tyko Say
Sax by Juliano Alfredo
Synth by Roksan Mandel
Readings by Jaromír Lelek, Honza Lohan, Jo Blin, Tim Postovít, Anna Pulkrabová
Thumbnail photo by Louis Armand

MOMENTUMENT: The Zine

This zine is the physical representation of Momentument, featuring 20-pages of promotional material, pictures, and graphics from the project. The zine was a limited-print and was given to attendees at the Prague premiere on August 21st.

View the archived zine on Archive.org
*The zine features photos courtesy of Jan Černy.

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Press Links

• Momentument Film Press Release
  
• Momentument Press Pack

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︎Seen in

• Sesaďme básníka z trůnu (A2 Magazine)

Past Events

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Excuse me, Žižkov

The title of the event, Excuse me, Žižkov, was selected to show our gratitude and respect to the Prague cultural scene as we would step back into it, parting our ways passed months of isolation and back into the public sphere.

The happening was carried out in multiple languages and modes of expression; local musicians, performers, writers, and audience members gathered to create a spontaneous language, sound, and action happening which not only caught the attention of residents & attendees but eventually the police, too.



Excuse me, Žižkov was our sixth OBJECT:PARADISE happening and our first event of 2021 due to Coronavirus restrictions. The performance was composed of both Czech & International residents and students, unified by the common goal to bring life back to the streets through the OBJECT:PARADISE Manifesto. 


Originally planned to be held at the iconic—or infamous—Žižkov steps below the Lipanská tram stop (Rokycanova & Chelčického), 30 minutes before the start of the event, we were met with a torrential rainfall coming north from Vinohrady. 

Lenka Bodnorová scurried down the stairs under the slaughter of rain with found furniture, an oblong table for example, and other obtuse kitchen items that she had planned to haul up and down the stairs and around audience members during the event—which was now threatened to be canceled.


At the bottom of the stairs, Mary Palencar began slashing paint across a white bed sheet and mixed it in with the rain, shouting through the downpour that the water “will just thin out the acrylic, maybe it will look better mushed into the cotton”. Sandra Pasławska ran to her, protecting her with an umbrella that would be nearly ripped away into the wind and blown deep into Žižkov.

While convening with the cast, production, and collective members, the decision was made to relocate the event to an underpass beside the Albert supermarket located at Olšanské Náměstí.

In a group composed of participants—audience members and performers—we collectively grabbed the equipment and took refuge in the covering near an overarching advertisement for steak and asparagus. 

The rain continued to come down and made hollow echoes throughout the underpass. We were met with a crowd of community members that were both deliberately and spontaneously waiting to see what would happen next. What were all these people here for—standing before an enlarged asparagus?

“Should we go back to the stairs now that things are clearing up”, one of us asked, but we had already moved the furniture, carried the beer crates, and lost our umbrellas.

Zoe Perrenoud, Roksan Mandel, Anna Kurkova , and Martin Guildenstern composed a quartet of string, horn, woodwind, and percussion that assisted the now slow trickle of rain in a backdrop soundscape.

After a few minutes, participants began to look around to see who would take the urban stage. 


Two mimes, Barbora Nechanická and Simona Rozložníková, emerged to the center of two columns supporting the underpass and began communicating a silent violence and romance between themselves while Jaromír Lelek hammered away on a typewriter and drank Braník with his remaining limbs.

The first reader, Tyko Say, followed the mime performance by pouring the remnants of a bottle of Braník on a copy of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, to which he then drank the sap from the slopping pages and threw the text on the ground.

He continued his performance with a piece titled “Excuse me, Žižkov” where he pranced around half slouched and exposing a rip in his jeans at the knee exclaiming, “Žižkov is happening I again, I know because I’m stepping in it. The dog knows when it happened!”

Yeva Kupchenko followed in a subtle voice, detailing accounts of the soft undertones and rough edges of Husinecká (at night coming back from downtown). The quartet played through as the mimes began panhandling for tips and beer money.

Nearly halfway through Yeva’s performance, Sasha Rose began bargaining from transparent coat pockets with audience members, selling from her jacket various items, for example, a condom and a folded up 1970’s porno picture & a roll of receipt paper (for spontaneous transactions), raw materials (a piece of metal and a piece of wood), and non-raw materials (6 small handmade painted prints and a picture frame). Sasha’s street sales would last the duration of the event and long into the night that followed.

*If you are interested in hiring a professional trenchcoat saleswoman to make an appearance at your next party or event, you can contact Sasha here.

Audience members soon found themselves wondering who was part of the performance and who accidentally came here. A slow murmur filled with laughs, gasps, stand-up bass, clarinet, and rain trickle. What would happen next? Why is that woman carrying a table with a dying monstera atop? 

Honza Dibitanzl entered the conversation by listening to audience members, circling the space in red eyeliner asking for words to spark a conversation. The quartet, directed by Roksan Mandel, comes in smooth with a steady beat that Honza glides his feet to.

He bends down, he stands close, he looks a man in the eyes for too long, and then drinks his beer. Suddenly a dog barks, and he barks back. The crowd laughs and Lenka begins stacking furniture like ill-fitted legos. The two circle the installation and lock eyes under a chair, their bodies stretched in the center of the space.

Thor Garcia postures himself before the microphone, sporting camouflage gloves, a fedora, and protective safety glasses. It’s raining and he’s wearing board shorts. He begins his act by repeating that the audience is a fence sitter, “raise your hand if you’re a fence sitter—you’re all fence sitters I know it!” and continued propagating the politics of the individual and the community while the crowd swayed before the asparagus.

Appearing from the crowd, a fight emerges between two men with similar haircuts, dark and curly. Saksham Sharda and Sylvain Benzakein. They begin shoving each other in the middle of the space before the audience and Thor. The orchestra persists in sound and image, in energy and static.

“Looks like we have a couple of fence sitters here! Who else is a fence sitter?” Thor responds.

The couple slows down for a minute, glances towards the crowd, and begins kissing with tongue in cheek. 

Everyone at the happening is talking, is bopping, is stopping to see what will happen next. Michael Rowland takes the mic and recounts his Žižkov devotion. He stands tall in front of the OBJECT:PARADISE banner and talks of sidewalks while standing still.

Halfway in, a suited man walks and blocks the view, the space between audience and performer. The space between producer and receiver. He’s talking loudly, abruptly, “did you cc me on that? Who’s the new intern? Who told you that?” 

Aaron Barnnett, the suit walker, continues to circle the space for the next twenty minutes, entering in and out of the stage, the performance, and becomes part of the text itself, coexisting as audience and performer.

“So that guy in the suit yelling on the phone is really part of all of this?” The disruption becomes part of the rhythm.

Tyko Say sits cross-legged at a mustard yellow typewriter in the center of the venue which sits on Lenka’s found furniture. He listens and rewrites the stanzas to Michael’s piece as he hears them.

“Žižkov...Žižkov...Žižkov...“

At stage left, Sára Drahoňovská begins sanitizing a table and needles in white latex gloves while Hunter Andrews sits with a pant leg rolled up above his knee.

Tyko Say stands behind the two and watch the heads of the audience suddenly start to turn all in one direction. Two policemen in bulletproof vests and FFP2 masks enter the stage, just behind Sára and Hunter.

Hunter begins his piece, “Oh Žizkov! Your streets are filling up with girls in flower dresses again!” The chaos ensues.

The audience watches intently, hands on cheeks, elbows on knees as the police scan the space for someone in charge. We’re all in charge. Roksan motions to the quartet to keep playing, to keep strumming, to keep blowing, to keep in charge, to keep the beat, to be the beat that the ship slowly sinks to.

“Is this part of the performance? Was that fight staged? Where’s the guy on the phone? Why are they still reading? Playing? Drinking?”

Jaromír Lelek approaches the two officers and greets them in Žižkov Česky. They reply, “someone called. Show us your papers, your permits, your credentials”.

Hunter projects his stanzas into the crowd as Sára jabs a needle in his thigh and begins to craft a giant “Ž” for Žižkov.

“Your hospodas are filling up again! Žižkov!”

Tyko and Jaromír entertain the police with filed notices, explanations, smiles, and raised eyebrows.

“We don’t have anything, we filed a public notice for the stair set. Not the grocery store.”

“But please explain what’s happening here—what is this?” the police persist. 

The audience comes in closer, enclosing the space between the two columns and crossing any boundary that is left between the audience and performer. Would the ship sink? Was the iceberg really that deep? 

Three more officers arrive—one with a blue shirt with checkered reflective squares on it.

“What’s going on here?”

“They’re having a poetry reading” one of the officers replied, seemingly shy to admit that they have to shut the happening down.

Collective members, Jaromír Lelek, Roksan Mandel, Tyko Say, and Sandra Pasławska deliberate on what to do next: back to the stairs? Shut it down? Anarchy? What about the third act?

The show will go on. Tyko took the mic and elaborated the situation to the participants of the moment, “no more music or microphone, but keep your beer and see what happens next.”

Sandra Pasławska and Mary Palencar begin laying out the large white sheet in the grass adjacent to our once-urban stage.

Sandra starts off a new text in a singing ode with a direct call to action to the audience, participants, police, and herself: to become Žizkov. 

Sandra gets on her knees and Mary covers her head, face, and dress in paint and starts to use her as a brush against the bed sheet. The police watch on intently, making sure to keep Jaromír in proximity. 

After some silence, participants of the moment begin to come forward towards mary’s brush, allowing their bodies to become painted in a shared coat of Žižkov. Mary holds the hands of those who dare to come up and, she greets them with a shared giggle.

Everyone knew what it was all about, and for that moment it felt like real communication was happening.

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We want to give a big thank you to everyone who made this event possible: crew, production, readers, musicians, performers, and most of all, the audience members. Without you all we could not have had such an enriching language experience.

Readers

Tyko Say
Yeva Kupchenko
Honza Dibitanzl
Thor Garcia
Michael Rowland
Hunter Andrews
Sandra Pasławska

Performers

Barbora Nechanická,
Simona Rozložníková
Mary Palencar
Aaron Barnett
Saksham Sharda
Sylvain Benzakein
Lenka Bodnorová
Sasha Rose
Jaromír Lelek
Sára Drahoňovská
Tyko Say

Musicians

Roksan Mandel
Zoe Perrenoud
Anna Kurkova
Martin Guildenstern

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