Nikola Ludlová, The Jindřich Chalupecký Society, May 2023
Throughout the duration of the collaborative exhibition Hay, Straw, Damp, the Jindřich Chalupecký Society realized three public programs. In keeping with the exhibition’s environmentalist and eco-feminist goal, the programs addressed a variety of environmental issues, although from a distinct disciplinary perspective.
In all cases though, the underlying ambition was to explore major environmental issues from a local perspective but also nuance the global environmentalist narrative by introducing local themes and perspectives from underrepresented groups. While the first public program focused on the legacy of the artist Zorka Ságlová, whose work provided impetus for the exhibition, for the contemporary Czech art world, the second event featured a discussion with female participants in social resistance and protest against environmental pollution in socialist Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s.
The women, then young moms, created an organization called Prague Mothers, which survived the fall of communism and continues to function today, albeit under a different name. The final event brought together an artist Tamara Moyzes, social anthropologists Roman Matoušek and Daniel Škobla, and an environmental scientist Davina Vačkářová whose scholarship informed a socially engaged work by Tamara Moyzes and Shlomi Yaffe entitled Lactism: Mycoremediation. The artwork addressed the environmental justice in the context of social exclusion. The artists responded more broadly to the entanglement of waste disposal and social inequality in Global North societies , pointing out that these heavily consumerist societies dispose of their waste by dumping it in poor countries, or in excluded areas where they had previously expelled or relocated unwanted citizens.
They specifically addressed the case of Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, who have spent decades living in slums on the fringes of villages and small towns, where municipalities fail to ensure waste management and instead dispose of toxic waste and rubbish near these slums. The artwork symbolically corrected this injustice by the spontaneous action of mycelia, which served in numerous functions throughout the installation as an active creative and political agent, symbol, and artistic technology.
