Thought & Beat

Ondřej Macl recounts the event (translated from Czech) in Itvar Magazine:

Žižkov, WHERE ARE YOU?

Photos by Adéla Hrdličková and Eduard Germis

I first came across the name OBJECT:PARADISE online through short videos where a man recites a poem while, next to him, a woman ecstatically smashes a chair or a computer. The verses are in English, but the scenes are happening in the centre of Prague in front of random passers-by. In another video the poet even has the book he’s reading from burning in his hands. And everything is filmed in nostalgically old-school VHS.

I immediately slipped into the curiosity of an amateur detective – what kind of parallel literary life is going on in the streets of the metropolis?

It was easy to find out that this is an international collective founded in 2018 in the Holešovice café Ouky Douky by a certain Tyko Say and Jeff Milton, in an effort to organise poetry happenings. Tyko Say is originally American; in his profile we learn that he “doesn’t exist”, and when I google Jeff Milton I only get a porn actress. The core of the now non-profit organisation OBJECT:PARADISE is also made up of the Turkish musician Roksan Mandel, performer Sandra Paslawska and the ginger-bearded Anglicist Jaromír Lelek. On their website there is also a manifesto that highlights how language is always situated in time and space, and in their happenings they strive for unique “objective moments” in which language is celebrated in its very appearance. Against the Coleridgean idea of poetry as “the best words in the best order” they stress sociolinguistic sharing, in which the audience itself becomes an essential part of the poem. In the end they are trying to awaken sensitivity to the poetic nature of the world.

“Why shouldn’t someone get tattooed during a poetry reading? Why couldn’t a brawl break out in which the opponents start kissing? Why not read poetry from slices of ham?”

What such principles – harking back to avant-garde cabarets and the happenings of the sixties – look like today could be seen on 28 January in the Kampus Hybernská gallery at the event Thought & Beat. The collective presented, on three screens at once, their second video OBJECT:PRAHA, a half-hour mapping of their activities (both videos are freely available on YouTube). The second highlight of the evening was the launch of a music-and-poetry album whose preparation, under the baton of Roksan Mendel, involved roughly twenty “Prague-based artists”. The album was created through collective improvisations with the aim of reviving Žižkov’s sounds and shouts, muted by the pandemic. The tracks can be heard, for example, on Spotify, but in Hybernská they were performed live, with a strong emphasis on the visual component.

One poet, when not speaking, was diligently working the mixing desk; another poured plastic beer over himself like a plant; some performers wandered around the space like abandoned molecules; a girl in a mask handed us slips of paper – mine read: “Poetry is under your tongue. And it bleeds a little.” The stage action was simultaneously duplicated by cameras onto screens that formed the gallery’s single exhibition. Over time the cluster of performers didn’t really change as much as condense, until everyone was producing some sort of sound. What stuck with me was the moment when a conductor hopped about between the musicians and poets, but no one followed her emphatic cues, as if she were pointlessly flapping her wings inside the chaos. No single person can give orders to the world; at most they can make a mistake, flash for a moment.

The uneven quality between individual performers didn’t matter at all. You could see that some had behind them demanding studies of jazz music, some were simply themselves in the here and now, some modelled themselves on Beat role-models, others glanced more towards Broadway, and yet another perceived Prague more in terms of a quasi-Berlin vibe.

The evening was a manifesto of creation open to everyone, creation whose aim was and is above all to bring together a cosmopolitan community. And it was precisely the view of foreigners on our capital city, with an emphasis on Žižkov, that I found most interesting.

Let us recall that Žižkov has been linked with artistic bohemia since the First Republic, when figures such as Franta Sauer, Jaroslav Hašek, the Longen and Neumann couples or Toyen roamed here. Somewhat unfairly, Žižkov has also been stuck with the label of a working-class district. More amusing are the attempts to proclaim it an independent republic. In the last decade it has grappled with strong gentrification – that is, the departure of original residents as the neighbourhood turns into a trendy quarter for tourists and entrepreneurs. Paradoxically, the myth of Žižkov as a centre of precaritised bohemia, in other words as Prague’s Montmartre, has become a brand used in adverts by the very people who are knowingly destroying that same Žižkov.

The foreigners around OBJECT:PARADISE, however, are not short-term tourists, nor do they come across as exchange students; rather, they are people who, for various life reasons, have decided to work and live here without necessarily mastering Czech. And in this cultural lostness they yearn for shared beauty.

Watching them, I felt a desire to pretend I didn’t understand Czech either, to live in my own country as a foreigner, to communicate in broken English – that new Esperanto – or just with signs and gestures. Alienated from the language of my parents, foreign even to the languages I was taught at school, and yet unable to understand the apes. Something truly close, these days, I would probably experience only in gestures of welcome, in a smile, maybe in a kiss. Perhaps I would first receive a punch and then a kiss from that same man. When I saw them in the gallery, I knew this land is not my home. And if in their performances they sealed references to some tradition, to some yesterday’s dream, what gripped me were the moments when that tradition didn’t fit them, when their graduation suit was tighter than their prom jacket, and when something in their performances burst out of life that had just crawled out of the new-century shell of exotic poses, out of the well-meant shells of our lives, and little by little shed from itself everything but the skin already rubbed raw.

- Ondřej Macl (July 2022)

Cast

About OBJECT:PRAHA II

OBJECT:PRAHA II 2022 · Film

OBJECT:PRAHA II (2022) is a VHS documentary of a record being born and a neighbourhood writing it in real time.

Shot on tape throughout 2021 in Prague’s Žižkov district, the film follows OBJECT:PARADISE as they build their second studio album, OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II, through a series of language happenings, improvised rehearsals, and late-night sessions. The camera drifts between Baracca Records, bars, flats, stairwells, and street corners, into one temporary, contemporary-dependent, ensemble.

In line with the OBJECT:PARADISE manifesto, readings are dragged off the pedestal and into the public.

About OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II

OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II 2022 · Album

OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II is the audio core of that same Žižkov moment. Recorded in 2021 during the happenings and studio sessions captured in OBJECT:PRAHA II, the album tries to press a living event onto wax.

Seven improvised compositions—shaped by more than twenty Prague-based artists—move through free jazz, punk, street noise, and multilingual spoken word. Turkish, Czech, English and other languages overlap; homemade instruments sit next to saxophone, drum kit, and tank drum.

True to the OBJECT:PARADISE manifesto, Vol. II treats poetry as a collective experience & situation rather than a finished text. It rebuilds the “dialogues of noise” that were muted by the Covid-19 pandemic and asks the listener to step into the room as another participant, not a distant observer.

Album credits

Recording studio

Baracca Records

Mixing and Mastering

Sifter Grim Records

From the album — OBJECT:PARADISE Vol. II

Album Credits — Side A

Album Credits — Side B