“I bought a harmonium for 200Czk from my schoolmate, Jiří Švestka, which I would move to the house and try to play it. Before that, I had this Concertino accordion which he gave me for free, and I also tried to play it. Back then, Oldřich was leaving the Pentagram band and was looking for some new group to play with. So we had a deal. I played with him at Rychta once. It might have been in 1978 or something like that. Later, more people would join, as Honza Štolba, Emil Pospíšil, who had been living next door for some time, and Martin Rychta. So after some time, this group had been formed, which we would call Mozart K. Mozartkugeln (or Mozart Balls).”
“This large project we called 'The Morning of the Magicians?' (´Jitro kouzelníků?´) which we pushed through together was quite an audacious one. There was even video and some sound installations. But back then, there wasn´t a single TV in the whole Trade Fair Palace. And the people working there had no clue how to install such an exhibition. They knew how to hang a painting or maybe move something, but that was it. So we had to do it by ourselves or to find someone else. “
“Ivan Kafka came up with this beautiful idea, and it was quite exhausting, as it took I don´t know how many hundred kilos... Maybe three tons of wet hay that we had to borrow, thanks to Jirka Kornatovský´s brother. Then we had to get it up to the first floor, where this roundel by Santini was. Ivan Kafka would mold it into a perfect dome-like shape matching with the surrounding interior. And there was this pleasant smell all around the monastery. But we had to keep an eye on it so it wouldn´t self-ignite. And Kafka wouldn´t bear any tricks. So the mound hadn´t been hollow inside and the hay would begin to get warm. After a week, we would stick a thermometer in it and find out that the temperature had risen to 80 degrees Celsius. So we had to bring the hay out and spread it around ambulatories.”
“I didn´t expect that situation here would change so quickly. I didn´t expect that something like that would happen during my lifetime. Of course, I would feel solidarity with the struggle which had been going on here. But at the same time, I had a guilty conscience about the fact that I had run away from it. That I would just leave. Even though I knew that every hand was needed. On the other hand, I just couldn´t give my life for the fight against a system which I considered unbeatable.”
Miloš Vojtěchovský was born on April 15th 1955 in Prague (Praha). He grew up in the district of Smíchov whose industrial character served as an influence for his later aesthetic development. While growing up, he frequented the local Music F Club, where he saw concerts by many performers, including ‘The Plastic People of the Universe’ at the beginning of their career. In the mid-70´s, he started to study at Charles University´s Department of aesthetics and art history. At the same time, he moved to a house in Radlice, where ‘The Plastic People’ had been rehearsing. He also shared the house with Oldřich Janota, with whom he had been in ‘Mozart K’ band from 1978 to 1981, playing the harmonium. After graduating from the university, he had been working as an art curator at regional galleries and later at the Museum of Czech Literature. After several years, he had been dismissed from the Museum for distributing ‘One Foot In’ (Jednou nohou) samizdat magazine. In 1985, he married his Dutch girlfriend and moved to Amsterdam. He had been doing various jobs there: from working at a serigraphy studio to giving lectures on art of the Central and the Eastern Europe. He started going back to Czechoslovakia in 1991, founding the Metamedia Centre (Centurm pro metamédia) in Plasy Monastery. Since 1995, he had been working as an art curator at the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art of the National Gallery in Prague. He left the Gallery in 1997, starting lecturing at the Brno university of technology´s Faculty of Fine Arts. Since 2004, he has been a tenured teacher at the FAMU Center for Audiovisual Studies.
