The lawns are composed of individual blades of grass that intertwine in various ways, resisting control. I imagine this intertwining represents some kind of speech, a recording or a script… A meadow or lawn speaks for itself; it is its own entity and cannot be owned by anyone. Even if someone thinks they can own a lawn, they can never have complete control over it. They can mow it however they want, but there will always be blades of grass growing in different directions, some growing faster and others deciding not to grow at all…

Of course, it’s complex. Individual clumps of grass also thrive and become autonomous depending on other factors, including the care they receive. I see the question of land ownership and control, expressed through something as “ordinary” as a “lawn,” as highly political and socially significant. Under the legal system of which we are part, whether we like it or not, it is possible to own a piece of land. This contradicts my conviction that one cannot own life or have absolute power and control over it, because nature cannot be owned, and no one will ever succeed in completely controlling it.

We are part of nature, and the principle of nature - or the landscape, the land - is not based on hierarchy and the accumulation of power, but rather on the redistribution of resources and the decentralization of power.

For me, soil regeneration is one of the most important practices. It’s through this practice that I realize the full extent of our connection to the soil: how important it is, what it holds, and what it needs. Soil is a network of interconnections that even monocultural standardization cannot destroy, because any soil can be conscientiously regenerated. Sophie Strand writes beautifully about this in works such as Composting Patriarchy and Make Me Good Soil. Another key practice for me is engaging with public space through gardening. It doesn’t have to be a radical or large-scale project. For me, even the little things matter: sowing seeds for pollinators, planting a fruit tree, or tending an existing tree.

I don’t think drawing on wood slows me down or speeds me up. Rather, it’s a sensory delight to watch the tip of a pencil or crayon carve a drawing into veneer or plywood. Veneer is a thin sheet of wood, between 0.3 and 6 mm thick, and it’s a dream to draw on. Plywood is thicker and preserves more of the wood’s grain and character. With colored pastels in particular, bits of pastel get caught in the grain, so I have to sharpen them often to draw in detail. You can’t draw in quite as much detail on plywood, but that suits me just fine. If I were drawing on paper, I’d want to work in such fine detail that it would irritate me, and my perfectionism and dissatisfaction would surface more than ever. When the surface gets in the way of precision, it challenges my perfectionism, and I can relax and enjoy drawing more. The wood grounds me.

What attracts me most to these drawings is precisely their “cuteness”: the so-called privilege of beauty that humanity culturally and politically attributes to cats. That is why it matters to me that viewers perceive cats as cute creatures whose image is (mis)used in pop culture precisely because of their cuteness. Simplification is fine; it involves capturing a specific aspect of a cat or anthropomorphizing scenes featuring one. This simplification makes the work readable and accessible. But speciesism lies behind these seemingly cute drawings. Cats are among the most popular subjects and sources of entertainment on social media. I also see feminist themes in these drawings, along with questions of colonialism (including the classification of cats as an invasive species) and speciesism, which is the focus of my visual work.

I am primarily trying to capture vulnerability through suffering that could have been prevented: suffering that is not part of natural cycles but is manufactured. The beings depicted in the reliefs experience hardship, anxiety, and sorrow stemming from this suffering, which, in my view, could have been avoided if the world were built on reciprocity rather than extractivism or imperialism. Visually, then, vulnerability is expressed through care, grief, sadness, and love, which underlies them all. Examples of preventable suffering include felled trees, mown grass, monocultures, and trees deformed by axe cuts.

I think gentleness depends mainly on how we choose to approach confrontation. If we approach it gently—in a measured, responsible way and with good intentions—it can be productive. If my goal is to bring more gentleness and tenderness into life, it’s important not to be afraid of conflict. For me, gentleness also means overthrowing the oppressive systems that stand in its way.

I understand gentleness as a kind of grace and tenderness, as mindfulness and listening, but also—and above all—as integrity and a refusal to compromise.

Biocorridors would run through the urban landscape, allowing species to migrate. Part of food production would shift from the overexploited countryside to cities in the form of community gardens. This concept builds on existing spaces, such as small gardens in inner courtyards or pockets of dense vegetation between transport routes. These spaces often already exist, but they are frequently isolated from one another. Connecting them could benefit a broad spectrum of the urban population. This would take pressure off the countryside, allowing rural land to regenerate and native animals and plants to return.

People would compost their organic waste and return it to the soil. They would eat seasonally; there would be no slaughterhouses, and animals would not be eaten. Soil life would be respected, and raw materials would no longer be mined but recycled. This would restore life to both fauna and flora, and global warming could be halted.

Of course, there would be no rich or super-rich. Wealth would be taxed progressively, and the means of production (for recycling, not new production) would be owned by workers, who would have sustainable jobs. Most importantly, there would be a universal basic income. The most ordinary and loveliest week.

What struck me most was the reflection sparked by a quote we used on one of the hangers in the installation: “An ant crosses your carpet. A spider weaves a pattern older than mammals beneath your stairs. Just nod, breathe, and think: ‘Good, it is all here. The forest, the mountains, the desert. At home in my home.’ The sterile box is the stranger. Not the ant. Not the spider.” This made me rethink every corner of our house, as well as our shared spaces, cities, and so-called community spaces. It introduced me to biophilic architecture and made me more hopeful about cities and space in general.

The little houses are made of plastic, reflecting the increasing use of synthetic materials—thermal insulation, pipes, and cables—in today’s construction industry. At the same time, these little houses are toys: standalone representations of structures, without context or connection to their environment. This reflects how housing is increasingly treated as an investment and as the fulfillment of an ideal of economic prosperity, often with little regard for its surroundings.

In Czechia, dandelions occupy an ambivalent place in public opinion. They have a cultural (and herbal) history here, and that knowledge is widespread. I wouldn’t say they’re unwanted, exactly—rather, people feel they need to be tamed and curated. And that is exactly what interests me. People generally like dandelions: they appreciate the bees they attract, dandelion honey, and their beauty. They don’t immediately see them as weeds to be destroyed, as they do other plants (some of which may also be medicinal). They only begin to see them that way when a dandelion appears in an already curated space. Then something wild and autonomous has entered on its own, following its own journey and appearing where it wants. And that’s the problem: freedom is forbidden. But who forbids it? Who decides where dandelions may stay and prosper on their own, and why? What does this reveal about romanticization and projection, especially in how people relate to nature?

The first thing that comes to mind is that we humans communicate our thoughts through systems of language and symbols (or, heaven forbid, bureaucracy—yuck). These symbols, in turn, shape how we understand and approach the world around us. So it’s important to reflect on who uses which symbols and how. The phrase “Mother Earth” is a good example: how does it influence our perception of the Earth?

My second thought concerns the worry that certain environmental measures might become yet another attempt to control nature. The debate around so-called invasive species comes to mind. Some experts try to implement measures that prevent the migration of species considered non-native to a given ecosystem; others take the view that we, as humans, should not interfere with such processes. This is a very complex issue, and we probably shouldn’t look for a universal answer. The human species is also part of nature, and we cannot simply remain passive observers. Viewing our presence as unequivocally negative is too simplistic. In many parts of Central Europe, for example, semi-steppes and meadows have been and remain characteristic features of the landscape. These ecosystems depend on grazing and regular mowing, without which biodiversity declines.

It’s not about control. Rather, we should be talking about our role within a network of relationships in a given environment, because ever since we invented agriculture, we have been altering the landscape and our relationship to it. In the exhibition, we explore the urbanized landscape and examine what kind of ecosystem a city is, which species live there, and which have sought refuge there because monocultures and mining in the countryside have left them without homes or food. The relationship between architecture and decorative floral or animal motifs is a very broad topic; different cultures and traditions have different reasons for using them. These motifs can convey control and dominance over nature, but also longing and our everyday disconnection from it.

Again, I’m speaking from a Central European perspective. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many people from peasant backgrounds were forced by economic circumstances to move to cities. We read the decorated metal gates found in these cities as expressions of longing for a lost daily coexistence with the countryside, but also as a manifesto calling for cities to become responsive to the needs of highly vulnerable beings (made vulnerable by anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene).

I have always questioned the way animals are portrayed in art. In the Czech Republic, this is a fairly common topic, especially in performance and research-based art. What receives less attention is how animals (and often plants) are represented in visual art, where they continue to be exploited, romanticized, fetishized, and objectified.

Practical care has made me reconsider what matters most to me: real help, not performative help. A troubling practice has become widespread here. Many people in the art world advocate or lobby for systemic change, for animals, and for landscape restoration, but their advocacy remains purely performative. It stays within institutions, without considering the actual work involved: what such efforts require and how to achieve real change. Practical care has helped me distinguish more clearly between self-centered, performative appeals and genuine solidarity and aid. I see this especially clearly in the visual arts, where landscapes and animals are romanticized and reduced to mere visual inspiration, reinforcing the speciesism and objectification that enable their exploitation.

Above all, exercises in seeing through eyes other than our own. This is difficult, of course, because we don’t share a common language, at least not in the human sense, so we can never know exactly how an animal or, say, a mountain feels. We can make assumptions based on our similarities and through anthropomorphism, which I don’t think is entirely wrong: Indigenous peoples have applied anthropomorphism to animals and plants for centuries, and their cultures largely revolve around it.

The problem arises when we impose human-made systems on other beings and then compare them to humans on that basis. But this is also where we begin to realize how difficult—and, above all, delicate—it is to advocate for another being, and why we need guidelines that continually consider their potential consent and interests. The exercise, then, is to ask what a given being needs, who depends on it, and what would happen if it suddenly ceased to exist.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about this kind of seeing as the grammar of animacy. She advocates for non-human beings to be recognized as persons, introducing us to new ways of relating to other beings through language, and thus through thought. She writes: “Maybe the grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves… Imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”

I’m not really looking for anything beyond whether participants decide for themselves to shift their attention elsewhere. What influences that decision? What or whom do they begin to notice? What do they begin to question, and from what perspective? Who or what do they want to take an interest in?

I’d like them to assess for themselves whether their attention has shifted and what that shift might bring to them or someone else. These reflections and self-reflections always give me a great deal. It’s wonderful to engage with people this way: to tune in together to the world around us and to life in the soil, or to trace our thoughts back to where disinterest, prejudice, or falsehood arise. We often talk about monoculture, permaculture, and the urban landscape.

I live with the expectations placed on artists, so I have to reflect on them while also navigating them, and I’m constantly learning. The paradox is that individualism has become a collectively imposed obligation in the art world; it is no longer a personal choice.

Pascal Gielen writes in his essay Spitting Off the Edge of the World: On the Aesthetics of Life and Death: “You must be authentic. This mandate weighs heavily on artists… You must forge your own personality—but all at once. Everyone for themselves, yet moving in the same direction. Cultivate your authentic self—just make sure you do it to the same rhythm of the algorithm.”

I’m interested in how, and to what extent, competitiveness polarizes us, and how discussions around so-called copying and drawing inspiration from others affect us. It’s not that I reject these concerns completely; rather, I try to reflect on them with empathy, because I realize we often blame individuals for problems that stem from the system. It saddens me to see the unfulfilling, competitive atmosphere this creates among people who have so much in common and who all want to live life to the fullest.

Conceptually, I’m mostly inspired by what I’m learning about nature (biota) and people’s relationship with it. Visually, I’m drawn to illustration and applied arts from around the 1980s. I love landscape art with touches of magical realism from the 1920s to the 1990s, such as Tom Uttech’s paintings of woods and birds and Charles Tunnicliffe’s paintings of animals and landscapes. And Ernst Kreidolf’s illustrations are the best I have ever seen!

Mostly audiobooks, and also podcasts. They keep me focused on both what I’m listening to and my work. I especially like listening to books on critical theory and philosophy while drawing, and autobiographies are really fun! Right now, I’m listening to Giuseppe Fiori’s biography Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, which is very inspiring. With podcasts, I like deep dives into niche topics, interviews with colleagues, and other subjects that interest me. My favorites are Ecopolitics, Green Dreamer, Upstream, The Poor Proles Almanac, The Plant Spirit, Last Born in the Wilderness, and Hysterie!

Any space that engages with the wider public, especially passersby! I really like see-through spaces, public-space interventions, and “banner” exhibition spaces. There are many lovely examples in Brno, where I’m from. They are usually artist-run off-spaces, which is important to me as well. I’ve had really good experiences with spaces like Umakart Gallery in Brno and Walk Thru Gallery in Hradec Králové. Both are accessible to everyone 24/7, and at events like openings, random members of the public can have an open dialogue with me. That is essential for me and my work.

Many come to mind, but one feels essential for this decade and the decades to come, as well as for understanding the history of the Industrial Revolution and the colonization of Turtle Island: The Democracy of Species by Robin Wall Kimmerer, published by Penguin Books. It belongs to Penguin’s Green Ideas series of around 30 short books, each exploring a different topic related to environmentalism, the ecological crisis, consumerism, and capitalism (big oil, pesticides, war, work, food…).

Kimmerer’s book is about reciprocity and biocentrism. She writes gently, almost poetically, but with the necessary urgency. She has written other books on this subject, but this one is short and contains everything, from building reciprocity between humans and the natural world to using language as a tool for biocentric change, both within ourselves and in the wider political world. Her relationship with plants and the wisdom she draws from their teachings continue to inspire me and give me hope, mindfulness, and courage.