Reaping Cooperation. Excursion and lectures at the Museum of Cooperative Movements

Language accessibility: Czech
Free entrance
Limited capacity – register here

An excursion and lectures in a lesser-known Prague museum with its director Pavel Černý, artist Uladzimir Hramovich, Markéta Mráčková and Barbora Šimonová, members of an architectural cooperative cosa.cz and Bolek Šmejkal from the Tenant's Initiative will connect the ideas of historical solidarity struggles with contemporary initiatives. 

Many thinkers argue that cooperation and mutual aid – and not capitalist competition – form the basis for human development and a fair society. The Museum of Cooperative Associations tells the story of cooperative movements in the Czechoslovak context. The event will include a guided tour of the museum led by its director, Pavel Černý, and the cultural cooperative cosa.cz (Markéta Mráčková & Barbora Šimonová), which has previously collaborated with the museum and is presenting new work in the main exhibition of the Biennale Matter of Art at the Trade Fair Palace of the National Gallery Prague. Their project focuses on the museum’s unique library and collection. Following the guided tour, a series of lectures will explore the history and contemporary moments of self-organized struggles within the contexts of workers’, cooperative, and tenant movements in the Czech Republic and beyond.

Markéta Mráčková and Barbora Šimonová (cosa.cz) met while studying at the Emil Přikryl School of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and they graduated from faculties of architecture in Prague and Brno. They have been working as an artist duo since 2013. In 2016 they founded the cultural cooperative cosa.cz with the aim of bringing their diverse activities in the fields of architecture, visual arts, literature, and film under one umbrella. Together they received a scholarship to the School of Architecture at Tianjin University, and they have attended artist residencies in Rustavi, Kharkiv, and Český Krumlov. In 2014 they published the book Legenda o sídlišti [The legend of the housing project] and a year later a Czech translation of Gottfried Müller’s stories Melancholie a dobrodružnost stavění: 25 zapomenutých staveb [The melancholy and adventure of construction: 25 forgotten buildings]. Since 2016 they have also been working on video portraits of buildings from the 1980s, which can be viewed on their website cosa.tv. In 2020 they published the book Ahoj sestro, vítej v Číně [Hello sister, welcome to China], which reflects on their five-month stay in China. They also occasionally dabble in architectural rap, and their songs “Bude to bílý, černý nebo maximálně šedý” [It’ll be white, black or at most gray] and “Baví vás to? Hlavně vás to musí bavit!” [Are you enjoying it? Above all, you have to enjoy it!] depict moments from the everyday practice of the two architects. Since 2020 they have been working together as assistants to Roman Brychta in Architecture Studio IV at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague.

Pavel Černý studied history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. Since his studies, he has been involved in the non-profit sector, where his activities include volunteer work as the chairman of the registered association the Antonín Švehla Society and editing the newsletter ŠveHLAS. In 2018, he wrote the publication “Men of 28 October 1918,” which is part of the large project Men of October, which includes, among other things, a collection of gold commemorative medals of the founders of Czechoslovakia led by Antonín Švehla.

He has worked in the field of museology on two levels. The first was within the activities of the Antonín Švehla Society, when he prepared five thematic exhibitions on Antonín Švehla and important agrarians or consulted on the project of the Gallery of the Men of 28 October for the District of Prague 15. He also organized several fundraising events. In March 2016, he and his colleagues organized the panel discussion Our Famous Agrarians, where historians spoke at the Antonín Švehla Library – ÚZEI. In April 2023 he spoke at an international scientific conference on Antonín Švehla at the National Museum of Natural History.

The second level was his work at the National Museum of Agriculture, where he had previously outsourced the project of the permanent exhibition Antonín Švehla Memorial (2012) and where in 2014–2015 he worked as a project manager. Since 2017 he has been the head of the Museum of Cooperatives and is involved in, among other things, library management, writing articles, conducting exhibitions, and organizing events.

Uladzimir Hramovich is a Belarusian artist who currently lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Gymnasium-College of Arts named after I. O. Akhremchik in Minsk, Belarus, in 2009 and the graphic arts department of the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in Minsk in 2015. He has been a member of the Problem Collective since 2016. Hramovich works with installations, graphics, and video. For him, materials such as concrete, granite, metal, paper, and paint are not just surfaces for history to leave its imprint on but agents that are able to deform history. In his artistic practice, Hramovich draws on the history of modernist art and architecture, the history of ideology and political movements, and the transformation of the urban space in Minsk. He is interested in the tension between the past and the present and studies monuments and rituals of memory that are overloaded with ideological meanings and embodied in material objects.

Hramovich has presented his work at various international institutions, including Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, Austria; «Ў» Gallery of Contemporary Art, Minsk, Belarus; House of Arts, Brno, Czech Republic; Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv, Ukraine; ABF, Stockholm, Sweden; Galerie Intershop, Leipzig, Germany; and others.

Boleslav Šmejkal is a social historian and a member of the Tenants Initiative. He is a PhD student at the Institute of Economic and Social History at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, and his research interests include the history of labor, workers’ movements, and affordable housing in interwar Czechoslovakia.

The Tenants' Initiative is a membership organisation established in 2022 that seeks social justice that will bring dignity and security of tenure for those who cannot achieve home ownership and gives tenants a voice and is able to defend them against injustice. They organize public meetings to discuss their issues and work together with individual tenants to resolve conflicts with their landlords and landladies.