Suite for Building a Forest
Civic Women: Community Visions
Curated by Lydia Matthews & Barbara Benish
A two-year cross-cultural collaboration marking the 30-year anniversary of the Artists' Revolution in former Czechoslovakia.
ArtMill and the CENTER FOR CREATIVE SUSTAINABILITY located in rural Bohemia, Czech Republic.
“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
Lydia Matthews and Barbara Benish brought an international group of artists together to make socially engaged works to honor eleven local women who have made lasting contributions to their community. They included Hanka Kalná, Božena Kodýtková, Markéta Okroupcová, Věra Knetlová, Iva Fišerová, Kateřina Červená, Paní Vlčková, Jana Turková, Eva Huikari, Markéta Mrázová.
Invited Artists: Bahar Behbahani, Elaine Buckholtz, Sonya Clark, Susanne Cockrell, Sarah K. Khan, Meeta Mastani, Mine Ovacik, G.E. Patterson, and Adonis Volanakis.
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, I 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. of writers and journalists from rural Bohemia, I discovered Alzbeta Peskova, who founded the Minerva Gymnasium for girls in Prague in 1890, an important threshold in secondary education for women in the Czech Republic. This seeded my inspiration to honor local school principal and “civic woman” Božena Kodýtková with a conversation about the role of education in civic life.
Interview with Civic Women artists for Czech Television, ČT 1, fall, 2019. By Hana Novaková.
Combing the two events, I led a dinner conversation about art and education as many of the artist and curators involved were also educators. Afterwards, we walked up 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 a record breaking hot, dry summer.Documentation of all the projects were presented at an old cino (cinema),in town, at the end of the week. Thank you Elaine Buckholtz!
