We're exploring how we can work together to make the school a place that truly reflects children's voices, dreams, and visions, and how we can integrate these into our daily practices. The school will open its doors for a day, inviting the public to join in the learning and teaching process. This includes lessons, workshops, creative exercises, temporary transformations, spatial interventions, and the introduction of new subjects conceived by the students themselves during an intensive week of collaboration. Visitors will have the freedom to explore the school, adopt new rules and identities, engage with prepared stimuli, exercises, and challenges, and practice skills that we might have long forgotten. We'll work on unlearning the patterns and habits that hold us back from dreaming, taking action, and fully connecting with each other across our differences.
At the same time, the programme is also thinking of those who, for various reasons, are not able to be either co-creators or spectators of the live event, and is preparing for them a printed vision of a different form of school written by the pupils themselves.
About authors:
Magdalena Jiřička Stojowska is a theatre director and dramaturgist. She studied Polish Studies at Jagiellonian University, Direction at PWST in Krakow, and pursued a PhD at the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre (The Academy of Performing Arts), during which she held a scholarship at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies (Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft) in Giessen, Germany. In the Czech Republic, she has directed productions for Studio hrdinů, Meetfactory, Archa Theatre, The City Alive association, the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, and created original works for the Community Center Nesedím, sousedím. In Poland, she worked in the dramaturgy department of the National Theatre – Stary Theatre in Krakow, where she contributed to the development and production of theatre festivals and artistic projects. As a dramaturgist, she has collaborated with notable figures such as Krystian Lupa, Agnieszka Holland, Anna Smolar, Iga Gańczarczyk, Michał Borczuch, Wojtek Ziemilski, and Vilma Bořkovec. She is also a co-founder of the Community Centre Nesedím, sousedím in Břevnov, where she focuses on conception and organization. At the centre, she runs a children's magazine editorial office and theatre projects with children and has developed projects for Archa Theatre, Kafkárna, Woods – Community, and Biennale Matter of Art 2024. Since 2023, she has been teaching at the MA program of the Department of Alternative and Puppet Theatre and Directing of Devised and Object Theatre at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.
Eva Koťátková is a visual artist who has made significant contributions to both the Czech and international art scenes. Through her critical institutional practice in contemporary art, she investigates alternative educational models, embodied participation, and our relationship with nature. Since the beginning of her career as an artist, educator, and activist, Koťátková has drawn inspiration from play, personal and embodied memory, radical imagination, social utopias, and practices of care, using these elements as building blocks for envisioning better worlds. She is a co-founder of the Anxiety Institute, and the magazine Krunýř, and she is actively involved in several educational initiatives, including Škola imaginace and Futuropolis. Koťátková has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Nottingham Contemporary (2023), Arter in Istanbul (2023), the National Gallery Prague, CAPC Bordeaux (both 2022), Kunstverein Hamburg (2018), Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan (2018), Belvedere 21 in Vienna (2017), and the Centre d'art contemporain in Pougues-les-Eaux (2016). Koťátková has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Nottingham Contemporary (2023), Arter in Istanbul (2023), the National Gallery Prague, CAPC Bordeaux (both 2022), Kunstverein Hamburg (2018), Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan (2018), Belvedere 21 in Vienna (2017), and the Centre d'art contemporain in Pougues-les-Eaux (2016). Her work has also been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018), the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019), and documenta fifteen (2022). In 2024, she represented the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale.
About project:
"Together with Magda, we conducted several longer and shorter workshops, each time looking for ways to create more space for children's voices and different forms of expression. We each work with different experiences and slightly different resources, but we are united in our desire to show the power of intergenerational sharing and collaboration and the importance of children's emancipation in a world that does not take children's voices seriously. We are interested in the role of the critical imagination, which does not just make us crazy, but overturns the ways in which we see, evaluate, relate, which can often take the form of a subtle disruption of everyday scripts or, conversely, a radical overturning of them. In addition to intergenerational cooperation, interspeciesism is important to us, i.e. taking animal, plant and other actors seriously as someone we should not exploit but learn from. In the current collaborative project, we want to look for ways to educate and learn together with the children, beyond normative categories and evaluative labels, and rather create a school of sharing, imagination and diversity."
Photo from the event Meeting of the Children's Editorial Board KRUNÝŘ under the Institut of Anxiety.