0:21:28
I wonder what’s changed. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just that the thing I already knew as less massive, less branching and intertwined, is expanding. I’m standing with Matouš in the imposing hall of the Kafka studio. He’s making coffee, and I’m surveying the large, circular table that holds a red tablecloth, several used cups, and unbitten apples.
The next day, I’m at home. I put on the short film Ivan made about Matouš. I try several times to write a coherent text. I wonder what’s changed. Isn’t the overgrown garden around the Kafka studio, which fell into Matouš’s lap along with the old hangar, a reflection of his transition from sculpture to permasculpture? I’m writing the text in bullet points.
The legacy of the garden.
The legacy of the Kafka studio.
The legacy of architectural statues.
The legacy of figural sculpture. Gutfreund, Štursa, Babylon, and the folk nativity scene.
The legacy of the old German gravestones, whose fragments he casts.
The legacy in the casts of statues at a dilapidated stadium in Pardubice (Wish, 2020).
The responsibility to the garden.
The responsibility of a caretaker.
The responsibility to the Sudeten gravestones and to the statues from the stadium.
The responsibility to people and places (the design of the sculpture for the community center in Horažďovice).
The responsibility that leads him to apologize for the fact that the vineyard chapel near Klučov will be made of concrete. I tell him that if this civilization one day drowns in it, it won’t be because of the sculptors.
The care taken of the garden so that it doesn’t stop being what it became when no one took care of it.
The care taken to have a quiet place to work.
The care taken by creating sculptural architecture equipped with a bird bath (Singing Fountain, 2019).
The care taken of children by parents. Hand in hand, and if they weren’t statues, they’d be walking through the woods together (En Marche, 2018).
I’m taking away a small cast from my visit. It resembles a stele, and people get it from the Artmat vending machine at one of the Czech Centers somewhere. On one of its surfaces is a shallow relief of an adult tree with a developed root system and sprouting leaves in its crown. On the reverse side, a man and woman are planting a seedling. Birds fly above them.
