Events

Prague Microfestival

(2021–Present)

Punctum · Prague Kampus Hybernská · Prague

POETRYACTION

The Prague Microfestival (PMF) is an annual festival of the arts, combining contemporary writing with art, film, theory and performance, curated by Louis Armand and David Vichnar. It is fully bilingual — Czech and English — and stages readings by contemporary poets and novelists alongside film projections, music, performance and visual art, in a polylogue of artforms.

Featured Poets

From 2021 to 2024, and again in 2026, Tyko Say and Sandra Pasławska have served as the festival's art directors, curating spaces that encourage inductive discovery through installation and scenographic design. The objective each year is twofold: to carry the performances and happenings of the festival, and to run OBJECT:PARADISE media in among them — excerpts from KROTCH Magazine, clips from the OBJECT:PRAHA series, and more — in celebration of the Prague literary and art scene. The poets featured on this page were part of the events that the O:P Collective participated in as part of scenographic design. The complete PMF anthology of participants can be found at https://www.praguemicrofestival.com/

The festival

PMF is the successor to the Prague International Poetry Festival (2004), which welcomed readings from more than forty writers across over twenty countries, and was founded by Louis Armand with Pam Brown, Phil Hammial and David Vichnar.

Since 2021, the festival's own readers and performers have included many poets from the O:P community and beyond: Akimbo TicTax, David Vichnar, Eve Miller, Grigory Semenchuk, Jo Blin, Joe Grim Feinberg, Leap Lembo, Louis Armand, Lyana Mytsko, Magdalena Kawecka, Michael Rowland, Michaela Králiková, Oxana Gogoľ, Palencar, Phillip O'Neil, R.G. Vašíček, Roksan Mandel, Sandra Pasławska, Siřem, Tyko Say, Václav Šulc, Zsolt Miklósvölgyi — among many, many others.

The festival's annual anthologies, 2020–2025, also print Emanuel Cameira, Robert Carrithers, Jana Orlová, Anna Špirochová, Pam Brown, Mojmir Pukl, Erkut Tokman, Ondřej Hrabal.

The PMF Collective is David Vichnar, Louis Armand, Tyko Say, Sandra Pasławska, Klára Přečková, Jan Kostohryz, Aljaž Koprivnikar, Jo Blin, Michael Rowland and Jeffrey Howe.

The art direction, since 2021

The OBJECT:PARADISE manifesto has been present and enacted at PMF each year since 2021, when the collective's first festival — at Punctum — ran as live video mixing of performative texts, projected onto a television installation around the venue and streamed live on YouTube.

Our role, then and in every edition since, has been to interpret and reappropriate the live performances and readings into a new text, displayed around the venue, influencing the contextual forces and receptions of the happening as a whole. The act of mixing visual signals into a new text through analogue modes gives creation a physicality and a deliberateness that is spontaneous, and can be influenced only by the present.

Across the editions since, the installations have grown from that single wall of televisions into full scenographic design: staged spaces built for each venue, video and print running in among the readings, and the annual KROTCH Magazine workshop feeding a samizdat back into the festival that made it. Since 2023, PMF has been hosted at Kampus Hybernská on the last weekend of October.

Our warm thanks to the readers, performers, contributors, partners, organizers and audience members who make each present moment.

A peak downstairs...

Peel slowly to see...redacted dummies, fake trash guerillustrations, televisual collages unframing bisweptually, wigged walls talking back, revolution stripping off its skin and bleeding all over the shop. Crayon borders, freewheelin' love dronxes, non-binary couches and reanimated pulp spines. Erase slowly...and go.

Because erasurism starts against the static.

Because you descend the stairs and stare down the wall of language. Words and other words to describe those words. Lines you have heard before. They come from OBJECT:PARADISE Transcripts – 5,000 lines of text recorded in the secrecy of basement pubs, underground happenings, and parties across the Independent Republic of Žižkov. Without author they scroll across the 12-meter wall infinitely and unjustly to be found and repurposed in understanding. How might I be erased today or in the future? One might say they can’t know.

Enter in then to acts of past and current protest in the hallway corridor interior. Expect cardboard & marker, glue & paper mache, mantra & moment croaked in red light and frog fog. Please destruct what has been constructed. Rowland’s piece ‘F&#k This Up!’ hangs in erasure to be found with provided tools and opportunity. A sharpie dangles from the ceiling, blown in passed wind, scribbling the sentence,

“DAVID CERNY’S LIFE MATTERS.”

You might find then the opportunity to erase one’s face. Why not create, always, with a new face? WIG LOAN gleams above a dozen colorful heads, spindled and twindled. In blonde pink, brunette and balding. OUR WIGS AREN’T CHIPPED the sign above them promises. 100kc to be erased. 100% legal. Tyko Say’s WIG LOAN, providing an array of human-hair, synthetic, and costume wigs that will bring your alter ego to bed, “Wigs may be costumed at discount if a reading is provided in your new identity.” The VHS camera swings from the wig head prose mouth and cuts to the action tomb of the basement, “Wake Up It's Quitting Time.”

Screens display the wig head, the theater, erect in static. Body parts of synthetic push against a plastic. Ozlem Akin’s limb exhibition pokes thru with red behind the shower curtain: Erased opportunity to understand one’s own body – in limbo, in shadow, in memento of the immedio, in Anachronical Somatization.

Readers read with a mouth on their own body: Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Turkish, English, Italian, and/or the language equivalent. A 3/16-piece sound orchestration stomps through the red paint and read print and cuts the glistening shiny tape:

“AMERIKA ANNOUNCES CHEESE FIRE. EFFECTIVELY IMMEDIATELY”.

A TV blinks its eyes. Cameras loot the moment. The revolution will not be recorded, but it will be televised, loudly in a basement that smells of off fish. Pukl’s protest stands adjacent with beard grown and hungered laugh hollowed.

AND! FILM! nightly. rightly. In silence soaking. Bookshop sells discount hardbacks to get one slouched back. QR payment required by latest Iphone. You may pay with your advertising ID and/or attention span.

The red light lays across a lady’s shoes while she contemplates the sounds of names. A-R-N-A-N-D. The general in Wig leans over, “Mam, they have crossed the Prague-3 border.” In response, wig head adjusts her brunette and is rushed to the crevice sklep to digest the movement,

“How do you translate the register of a semi colon in a Discord DM?”

The war room displays misuse of language and a bottle of red to sooth the moment. She flips through the war room periodical,

“SEX ONCE A DAY WITH THE DOCTOR KEEPS YOUR WIFE AWAY.”

Akohol erases the whole. She sinks in her chair, licks the wax of the evening envelope, seals it and plans that in the future she will say that she forgot it in the moment.

Poets bombard the outside world.

Bald men invent a new invention.

The ship sinks to a violin without strings

The whole world is thrown into the Vltava.

All is erased.

Nothing exists

Until it’s found

and erased

again and

sold back to you

in the language

of the now

Written by Tyko Say and Michael Rowland for the 18th annual Prague Microfestival, themed Erasurism.

The wall

The festival since 2021, photographed by Louis Armand.

Prague Microfestival (Photo by Louis Armand)

Tyko Say filming for Existence is Resistance (Photo by Louis Armand)

The zines

Each year the KROTCH Magazine workshop ran through the festival: no education required, no portfolio, no age limit — write, cut, glue, draw, assemble. Whatever came off the table that day was collected, typeset overnight and printed as a samizdat. Both editions are here in full.

And beyond the samizdats, the festival publishes real books: the annual anthologies, collecting the year's authors and performers. Both sit below the zines — each opens as a free PDF from the festival's own anthology page.