We have joined forces with the Zažít město jinak initiative, Automat and the Prague Public Transport Company to implement one of our most important projects to date. Months of joint work finally resulted in the realization of an interactive exhibition, which is on display in the lobby of the metro station A at Můstek from October 4th 2022.

The exhibition itself aims to reach out to random passersby, sometimes offering subtle provocative questions and to stimulate the desire to be closer to each other, and thus gradually overcome physical and mental barriers together. This is the key theme for the exhibition. The collaboration that has led to the creation of the exhibition is directly related to the theme of this year’s Experience the City Differently – Without Barriers.

“One of the intentions of the exhibition is to reach out to the general public and offer a different view of places we pass through every day and pay only marginal attention to,” says one of the exhibition’s curators, Eliška Špálová, coordinator of the accompanying programme Zažít město jinak. For this reason (just like the PRAHO! project itself) the exhibition is interactive. People have the opportunity to look into the minds of other residents, with whom they contribute to the daily running of the entire city through the testimonies on display, or even to answer a few intimate questions using QR codes. And because it is extremely important for the initiators of the exhibition to point out that every opinion is valid in our society, it is possible to share your insights, feelings or statements anonymously. Thanks to this, participants can  share even their most secret thoughts.

The exhibition features eight parts, each thematically focused on a different physical, mental or emotional barrier. One of them also includes a mirror that offers the opportunity to express one’s current feelings visually. Thus, the initiators of the exhibition do not aim to get the reader to share their thoughts only through text, but to use all possible means to express their current feelings. People passing by can be confronted with the artist’s efforts to record their inner processes as creatively as possible.

“In the visual we worked with the barrier of sensory experience – sight. Even the textual form of the exhibition itself refers to the mental barrier that language can represent,” says Nina Sibinská, the author of the visual design and a long-term artistic extern of the PRAHO! project. She also adds that a sensitive approach and a desire for maximum sustainability were extremely important for the creation of the entire project from the beginning. For this reason, the exhibition partly works with recycled materials from previous installations of PRAHO!

On the day of the exhibition, an opening was also held at the same place, which more than a hundred people attended. Those were the first to have the opportunity to react to the different parts of the exhibition. In the first evening alone, the initiators managed to collect dozens of individual confessions, which serve as a basis for the next planned project of PRAHO!

Each of the shared confessions- also thanks to this realization – further contributes to the long-standing effort of the  PRAHO! team to deepen the anonymous intimacy of the entire city and pointing to the fact that we can be much closer to each other in this seemingly estranged world.

The Zažít město jinak initiative published its own article about the exhibition. You can find it here.