Date: 04.07.2018
Beginning: 19:00

This summer the etc.gallery is introducing Tomáš Hlaváček, a student of the Department of the documentary movies FAMU, by means of presentations and screening evenings. During his two-months residence the artist is going to explore methodological procedures of the so-called ‘spontaneous film’. The core of the present work touches upon the topics of active viewers’ participation, how to read a documentary presentation and what is the role of cell phones in documenting everydayness.

As the author himself writes: “It was the Soviet assembler Dziga Vertov, who in his stubborn documentary effort to capture lived reality in its genuine purity, set up an imperative for himself – “to catch life red-handed”. It is this hard-to-define act of being caught, which does not have firm and clear contours, whose ambiguity led to a whole variety of forms and procedures of presenting reality in the history of the audiovisual media.”

The creative principle Hlaváček plans to work with comes out of the spontaneous gesture the viewer extends toward an accidental immediate situation. Thus spontaneity is an unprepared and unplanned response to an impulse from external reality, and as such does not have its topic predefined. If topic in not defined beforehand, it is similarly not possible to predefine motivation to observe given situation.

Accompanying events
July 4 – September 9 2018

Final presentation of the new work: September, 5 2018

The program of the etc. gallery is financially supported by grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Prague City Hall.