2024-09-23 02:56:30
At the end of the week, the writers will debate in an airship called Gulliver, which stands on the roof of the DOX Contemporary Art Center in Prague. “I’m often asked why we don’t exhibit art in Gulliver. It’s because air flows into the airship, we can’t exhibit anything there, but stories are told here, it’s a space dedicated to literature,” explains program director Michaela Šilpochová.
The English-educated woman is behind the international festival of art, literature and education called Fall, the second year of which is organized by DOX in Holešovice from this Thursday 19th to Sunday 22nd September.
In addition to the airship, readings, debates and performances will also take place in the premises of the three local exhibitions. The show called Kafkaesque is dedicated to the writer’s legacy in contemporary art 100 years after the death of Franz Kafka, the painter Adam Štech named his project after the French literary troublemaker Michel Houellebecq, and the artist Josef Bolf presents an extensive collection of paintings here under the title Melancholy of Outer Limits. “I am interested in the connection between the worlds of literature and visual art. We could organize an exhibition with a reading, but I didn’t want it that way,” explains Michaela Šilpochová. “In connection with exhibitions, I enjoy thinking about their connections with literature. There are visual artists who immerse themselves in the visual world, they are interested in it and I am interested in them. The same is true of writing artists, but not much is known about them,” he adds.
You can listen to the podcast with Michaela Šilpochová here:
Last year’s first year of the festival asked what we need stories for. This year’s one deals with portrait and self-portrait, that is, how we tell our life and the lives of others.
For the first time, the domestic audience will be able to meet, for example, the forty-three-year-old British writer Max Porter, a rising star of island literature and the chairman of the jury for next year’s prestigious International Man Booker Prize. “Max Porter fulfills my ideas of an ideal guest for our festival. He studied art history and came to the writing profession in a strange way, because he was a bookseller for many years. Max is interested in language, visual arts and music, the text has great energy and he enjoys performing live,” he describes Šilpochová author, whose prose debut was also published in a Czech translation under the title Žal je to s křidly.
Michaela Šilpochová in front of the airship Gulliver on the roof of DOX. | Photo: Honza Mudra
Another star of the festival will be the Canadian-Argentine essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel. He is preceded by the reputation of a man who, as a young man, went to read to the then blind giant of world literature, Jorge Luis Borges. “He returns to the formative experience in a number of his texts and will talk about it at the festival as well,” explains the Šilpoch literati, who is also a historian of reading and a peculiar literary sponsor. In Lisbon this April, they opened the Center for the History of Reading, the foundation of which is the forty thousand volumes of Manguela’s library. The writer donated it to the Portuguese capital.
Fall also has a strong Czech line, poet Petr Borkovec, Russian writer Alena Machoninová or novelists Marek Torčík, Jan Němec, Magdaléna Platzová and Bianca Bellová will come to read their texts and debate. “Most recently, I read her novel The Invisible Man, which was published last week,” the organizer mentions to Bellová.
The appeal of the international program and venue of Fall is to some extent replaced by the Prague Writers’ Festival, which was organized in the Czech Republic between 1991 and 2022 by the American poet Michael March. He brought to the metropolis, for example, winners of the Nobel Prize or other literary awards Herta Müller, Harold Pinter, Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie.
On the current map of major literary events, Fall finds itself next to the World of Books fair, held in Prague, or the Author’s Reading Month, which, on the other hand, bypasses the capital.
“The ambition of the Fall festival was not to compete with what already exists or to define itself. Not only in literature, but in art in general, when I hear the word competition, my hair stands on end,” laughs Michaela Šilpochová. “It’s such a non-profit and underfunded industry that talking about competition seems ridiculous to me. If we define our sandbox, we’ll still live in a provincial world and we won’t be able to bring in big names from the world. That’s why it’s important to maintain relationships and connections. We are here in a small space,” he adds.
Welcome to the Na dotek podcast. Petr Vizina’s guest is Michaela Šilpochová from the DOX Contemporary Art Center in Prague. To listen on the Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Spreaker platforms.