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. Since 2023, PMF has been hosted at Kampus Hybernská on the last weekend of October.
Our warm thanks to the readers, performers, contributors, partners, organizers and audience members who make each present moment.
A peak downstairs...
Peel slowly to see...redacted dummies, fake trash guerillustrations, televisual collages unframing bisweptually, wigged walls talking back, revolution stripping off its skin and bleeding all over the shop. Crayon borders, freewheelin' love dronxes, non-binary couches and reanimated pulp spines. Erase slowly...and go.
Because erasurism starts against the static.
Because you descend the stairs and stare down the wall of language. Words and other words to describe those words. Lines you have heard before. They come from OBJECT:PARADISE Transcripts – 5,000 lines of text recorded in the secrecy of basement pubs, underground happenings, and parties across the Independent Republic of Žižkov. Without author they scroll across the 12-meter wall infinitely and unjustly to be found and repurposed in understanding. How might I be erased today or in the future? One might say they can’t know.
Enter in then to acts of past and current protest in the hallway corridor interior. Expect cardboard & marker, glue & paper mache, mantra & moment croaked in red light and frog fog. Please destruct what has been constructed. Rowland’s piece ‘F&#k This Up!’ hangs in erasure to be found with provided tools and opportunity. A sharpie dangles from the ceiling, blown in passed wind, scribbling the sentence,
“DAVID CERNY’S LIFE MATTERS.”
You might find then the opportunity to erase one’s face. Why not create, always, with a new face? WIG LOAN gleams above a dozen colorful heads, spindled and twindled. In blonde pink, brunette and balding. OUR WIGS AREN’T CHIPPED the sign above them promises. 100kc to be erased. 100% legal. Tyko Say’s WIG LOAN, providing an array of human-hair, synthetic, and costume wigs that will bring your alter ego to bed, “Wigs may be costumed at discount if a reading is provided in your new identity.” The VHS camera swings from the wig head prose mouth and cuts to the action tomb of the basement, “Wake Up It's Quitting Time.”
Screens display the wig head, the theater, erect in static. Body parts of synthetic push against a plastic. Ozlem Akin’s limb exhibition pokes thru with red behind the shower curtain: Erased opportunity to understand one’s own body – in limbo, in shadow, in memento of the immedio, in Anachronical Somatization.
Readers read with a mouth on their own body: Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Turkish, English, Italian, and/or the language equivalent. A 3/16-piece sound orchestration stomps through the red paint and read print and cuts the glistening shiny tape:
“AMERIKA ANNOUNCES CHEESE FIRE. EFFECTIVELY IMMEDIATELY”.
A TV blinks its eyes. Cameras loot the moment. The revolution will not be recorded, but it will be televised, loudly in a basement that smells of off fish. Pukl’s protest stands adjacent with beard grown and hungered laugh hollowed.
AND! FILM! nightly. rightly. In silence soaking. Bookshop sells discount hardbacks to get one slouched back. QR payment required by latest Iphone. You may pay with your advertising ID and/or attention span.
The red light lays across a lady’s shoes while she contemplates the sounds of names. A-R-N-A-N-D. The general in Wig leans over, “Mam, they have crossed the Prague-3 border.” In response, wig head adjusts her brunette and is rushed to the crevice sklep to digest the movement,
“How do you translate the register of a semi colon in a Discord DM?”
The war room displays misuse of language and a bottle of red to sooth the moment. She flips through the war room periodical,
“SEX ONCE A DAY WITH THE DOCTOR KEEPS YOUR WIFE AWAY.”
Akohol erases the whole. She sinks in her chair, licks the wax of the evening envelope, seals it and plans that in the future she will say that she forgot it in the moment.
Poets bombard the outside world.
Bald men invent a new invention.
The ship sinks to a violin without strings
The whole world is thrown into the Vltava.
All is erased.
Nothing exists
Until it’s found
and erased
again and
sold back to you
in the language
of the now
Written by Tyko Say and Michael Rowland for the 18th annual Prague Microfestival, themed Erasurism.
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.
