Dílna Mikulov - Art symposium
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Dear friends of visual art,

The successful 6th year of the Mikulov Art Symposium is over. Traditions and successes of all of its years are a challenge for organizing future years. I personally highly respect everyone who can do something and has achieved something. I would like to use this opportunity to thank once more to all the organizers and participants of the Symposium and wish them lost of luck in their work. I thank to everybody.

Stanislav Mach
Mayor of the town of Mikulov


It is November, bleak and dreary. I promised a couple of lines for the catalogue and I feel that I have already said everything about my relation to the “dílna” and anything else would be a repletion of something that had been already said and written. All those words of joy of the “dílna”. Of the joy that it was established and it continues each year again and again; that it takes place at the chateau and that it gives pleasure to all the museum staff and the participants. That it gives pleasure to the Town Hall and that’s why they support it. That the “dílna” is being talked about with respect on the stage as well as in the audience at the final exhibition and all year round far beyond the boundaries of the town of Mikulov. That the “dílna” is the corner stone of the Mikulov cultural summer which is something larger and more significant towns envy us. It was perhaps today’s weather and memory of the summer that made me remember the new feelings I had this year – that it’s nice to in a town where so many competent people work for its cultural life with visible joy. I would like to thank RAP again and their friends for the care of the Mikulov Art Symposiums.

In Mikulov, 5th November 1999
Dobromila Brichtová
Director of the Regional Museum in Mikulov

I am very happy that the “dílna” has become a tradition, which is proven by the 6th year of the Mikulov Art Symposium. I wish the artists to do well not only in Mikulov but in their entire artistic careers so that they create valuable works that will speak to the visitors. The work will enrich the chateau and will attract many visitors to Mikulov and its environment. The success of the exhibition in Prague in the Hall under the Plečnik Staircase confirmed the quality of the presented works by the contemporary young generation. The atmosphere of these encounters is always inspiring and unique. I am happy to have been around.

Ing. Dymo Piškula
Head of the Břeclav District Authority

The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges talks about a man in one of his short stories with a phenomenal memory which made it impossible for him to forget any experience. He could, for himself, with total exactness compare the whisper of paddles of a boat he once used twenty years ago, with another, current experience. I think that some works of art are such materialized memories of volatile moments; memories that have the capacity to overcome horizons of time and space and regardless of them enter in mutual relations not following the reductive and forgetting logic of human memory but following the timeless logic of art. For the fact such feelings, difficult to name and render with words, feelings that create the true and often ignored essence of many events, do not sink into oblivion and that there are such means that do capture then, for this we must be grateful to artists as those who implement this possibility. It is the artists who know that for their message to overcome the power of gravity and to find way to other worlds, many such encounters are necessary from which new contexts come out. Artists, just like diplomats, know that some encounters must be formed like works of art – to establish the right proportion of time, place and to find the names of people who are to meet in such a way that would get things to move.
It is my conviction that the Mikulov art Symposium is on the right path to become such a cultural eent that will have this ability of primary importance to create relations and contexts between artists and their views of the world. I wish a lot of luck to the future years as well and I believe the its six years of history will continue with dignity in the future.

Jiří Gruša
His Excellency, Ambassador of the Czech Republic to Austria


The eclipse of the sun is happening right now. We are lying in the warm grass of the Mikulov Chateau part. Producer Jitka Kapičáková Havlíková is brings us grilled chicken and wine, Martina Riedlbauchová uses the opportunity for getting some tan and the horizontal position for getting some rest. Markéta Titlová excitedly speaks of the turquoise green of the clouds which can be seen through welding glasses. Martin Mainer helps himself to mouthfuls of chicken and washes it down with wine, smiling. Meanwhile, he runs about, unties the dogs from the trees and shouts that this is not a good thing to do. Jan Bačkovský does not say anything and thinks of the arrival of wife, who is in anticipation. Technical assistant Roman Sliwka sits nearby with his girlfriend and observes the sky as well as the drinking, shouting and drinking group of people. Libor Lípa, the Symposium’s Guarantee, is on the phone with Nikos Armutidis to find out what he sees at his home. Nikos answers in his orginal style: “It’s all worth shit.” Jiří Sobotka, the sculptor, calmly says that the end of the world might as well happen, and eats some chicken. Teacher Dalibor Chatrný is missing. We remember him during the feast and the eclipse. There is no more wine or chicken. The tension of the eclipse is at the climax. Everything is dim. Clouds. Shouting and applauding. A truck comes. A huge crane arrives to position two-and-a-half-ton stone statue by Pavel Opočenský. It is crossing the Hungarian border. It’s raining. This was one day of the Mikulov Art Symposium “dílna” 99.

L. L., Wednesday 11th August 1999 Mikulov

Me writing in this catalogue is not for the first time, and perhaps not event the last. The flow of sentences has always been general technical, but between the lines, a distinct pressure can be felt for the event to be important, to be, to move higher and higher in its quality as regards the organization as well as the art works themselves. To create a collection of permanent value and to push for it, or to follow this goal and resolution. You can’t do anything without will, love, money and vision (at least when it comes to symposiums). And “dílna” is worth it. Let’s build a permanent contemporary art exposition tight here at the Mikulov chateau, on the border with the European Union and let’s become an exception in the filed of art as well. Wine and art are in fact a nice and rare exception. There’s no need to conceive what has already been conceived. Let’s just raise the banner (town officials, council members, mayors) and let it fly. They are thinking all around us where and how into the third millennium. With respect

Libor Lípa
Guarantee of the Symposium

For 25 years, I have been trying to bring creative people to Mikulov and share with them the town with a unique disposition. Creative visitors humanize us, “re-settled barbarians”. The “dílna” does a lot of humanizing. Especially this year.

Štefan Kapičák