Prague Microfestival

From 2021 to 2024, and again in 2026, Tyko Say and Sandra Pasławska have served as the festival's art directors, curating spaces that encourage inductive discovery through installation and scenographic design. The objective each year is twofold: to carry the performances and happenings of the festival, and to run OBJECT:PARADISE media in among them — excerpts from KROTCH Magazine, clips from the OBJECT:PRAHA series, and more — in celebration of the Prague literary and art scene.

The festival

PMF is the successor to the Prague International Poetry Festival (2004), which welcomed readings from more than forty writers across over twenty countries, and was founded by Louis Armand with Pam Brown, Phil Hammial and David Vichnar.

Since 2021, the festival's own readers and performers have included many poets from the O:P community and beyond: Akimbo TicTax, David Vichnar, Eve Miller, Grigory Semenchuk, Jo Blin, Joe Grim Feinberg, Leap Lembo, Louis Armand, Lyana Mytsko, Magdalena Kawecka, Michael Rowland, Michaela Králiková, Oxana Gogoľ, Palencar, Phillip O'Neil, R.G. Vašíček, Roksan Mandel, Sandra Pasławska, Siřem, Tyko Say, Václav Šulc, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi — among many, many others.

The PMF Collective is David Vichnar, Louis Armand, Tyko Say, Sandra Pasławska, Klára Přečková, Jan Kostohryz, Aljaž Koprivnikar, Jo Blin, Michael Rowland and Jeffrey Howe.

The art direction, since 2021

The OBJECT:PARADISE manifesto has been present and enacted at PMF each year since 2021, when the collective's first festival — at Punctum — ran as live video mixing of performative texts, projected onto a television installation around the venue and streamed live on YouTube.

Our role, then and in every edition since, has been to interpret and reappropriate the live performances and readings into a new text, displayed around the venue, influencing the contextual forces and receptions of the happening as a whole. The act of mixing visual signals into a new text through analogue modes gives creation a physicality and a deliberateness that is spontaneous, and can be influenced only by the present.

Across the editions since, the installations have grown from that single wall of televisions into full scenographic design: staged spaces built for each venue, video and print running in among the readings, and the annual KROTCH Magazine workshop feeding a samizdat back into the festival that made it.

Our warm thanks to the readers, performers, contributors, partners, organizers and audience members who make each present moment.

The wall

The festival since 2021, photographed by Louis Armand.

The zines

Each year the KROTCH Magazine workshop ran through the festival: no education required, no portfolio, no age limit — write, cut, glue, draw, assemble. Whatever came off the table that day was collected, typeset overnight and printed as a samizdat. Both editions are here in full.

And beyond the samizdats, the festival publishes real books: the annual anthologies, collecting the year's authors and performers. Both sit below the zines — each opens as a free PDF from the festival's own anthology page.