Suite for Building a Forest
with Elaine Buckholtz
Civic Women: Community Visions
Curated by Lydia Matthews & Barbara Benish
ArtMill and the CENTER FOR CREATIVE SUSTAINABILITY located in rural Bohemia, Czech Republic.
A two-year cross-cultural collaboration marking the 30-year anniversary of the Artists' Revolution in former Czechoslovakia.
Lydia Matthews and Barbara Benish brought an international group of artists together to make socially engaged works on site. Fellow artists included: Bahar Behbahani, Elaine Buckholtz, Sonya Clark, Sarah K. Khan, Meeta Mastani, Mine Ovacik, G.E. Patterson, and Adonis Volanakis. Local Women Participants: Hanka Kalná, Božena Kodýtková, Markéta Okroupcová, Věra Knetlová, Iva Fišerová, Kateřina Červená, Paní Vlčková, Jana Turková, Eva Huikari, Markéta Mrázová
During a research visit to ArtMill: Center for Sustainable Creativity in 2018, I walked next to a small grove of trees along the road near a small village. Inquiring about this little forest in the middle of a field, I was told about a rural tradition to prepare for the next generation by planting trees for timber to build-out the family home. Inspired by this long-term planning, we decided to plant a group of trees on the land at Art Mill, to symbolically seed and nourish a future generation of women.
Suite for Building a Forest was a group performance involving local trees, women in the community and ancestral lineages. In researching the lives and work of early feminist writers and journalists from rural Bohemia, such as Alzbeta Peskova, who started the Minerva gymnasium for girls in Prague in 1890, we decided to hold a conversation about the role of education in civic life. The tree-planting took place on the new moon. First, Elaine Buckholtz and I led a dinner conversation about art and education in honor of local school principal and “civic woman” Božena Kodýtková. Afterwards, we walked up on the hill in the dark and planted Lipa trees and a ring of hazelnut trees on the hillside—a ritual planting to invoke and prepare for a next generation of civic women. We chose hazelnut trees for their sacred mythological references and food production. And we prayed for rain.
“In mid-summer 2019, in the Bohemian village of Horaždovice, Czech Republic, the local KINO was transformed into a hub of creative activity, community exchange and collective imagining. This site, built in the1970s during Stalinist-influenced totalitarian rule, survived the first twenty-five years of national democratic reforms after the Velvet Revolution, only to shut its doors two years ago as the town’s population dwindled and more private digital media platforms became popular. But for a short period that summer, Horaždovice's KINO once again become animated, illuminating possible worlds imagined by local women in collaboration with nine international artists.”
https://www.art-dialogue.org/civic-women