Grafting Resilience

As part of the upcoming Biennale Matter of Art 2024 and in cooperation with the Hraničář Gallery in Ústí nad Labem, tranzit.cz invites you to an encounter with Berlin-based Polish visual artist Alicja Rogalska, journalist Saša Uhlová, and Platforma Výkvět, a self-organized network of ecological flower farmers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia with whom Rogalska is collaborating for her new work for the biennale. The event will be partly in Czech and partly in English (as stated in the schedule bellow) and is for free.

The event will focus on the working conditions and need for ecological change in agriculture. In the first part of the evening, we will talk about how seasonal agricultural work on industrial farms across Western Europe is done primarily by migrants—among them many Eastern Europeans—and discuss what possibilities of self-organization these precarious workers have, based on examples of Alicja Rogalska’s socially engaged artistic practice and Saša Uhlová’s approach to undercover journalism in her collaboration with the documentary filmmaker Apolena Rychlíková. How can the work of artists, journalists, and filmmakers intervene in these workers’ struggles in a generative way?

The title Grafting Resilience refers not only to the impact of the climate crisis on agriculture, but also the need to build resistance and resilience in the face of exploitative labor conditions, and more solidarity between workers and farmers.

This event is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU and The City of Prague.

Alicja Rogalska will introduce and screen her video work The Royals (2018–2019), created in collaboration with migrant potato farm workers on the Island of Jersey (British Islands). The video documents a series of conversations about establishing a prize for the best employer in the agricultural sector and about starting a trade union. During each session, the workers made clay potatoes, relying on tactile memory. One of the potatoes was cast in bronze as the prize—yet to be awarded.

Saša Uhlová will show a short excerpt from her collaboration with Apolena Rychlíková on their new film Limits of Europe before its world premiere. The film asks: “Why are we still witnessing such glaring economic inequality between the ‘West’ and the ‘East,’ and why are so many people forced to leave their families to look for work far from their homes?” In a conversation with Alicja Rogalska and Katalin Erdődi (co-curator of Matter of Art 2024), Uhlová will share her experiences from working undercover alongside seasonal workers from Poland at a large farm in Germany.

The second part of the evening is dedicated to Platforma Výkvět, who will introduce their work as ecological flower farmers and share how to make a winter bouquet of dried flowers through a “florist show”, while talking about agroecological change and farmers’ self-organization. Why is it important to think critically about the globalized industry of flower farming (which perpetuates exploitative labor conditions in the Global South) and buy cut flowers that are locally grown? What does it mean to be an ecological flower farmer and how does Výkvět function? How do Výkvět members think about seasonality and about flowers as part of our everyday lives? What more ecological and emancipatory futures would they like to see blossoming?

The Výkvět members’ presentation will be followed by an open conversation involving all of the guests and the audience.