Some months ago I have started to put together my work, provisionally named “The First Book of Emblems”. During residential stay in Vienna, I would like to go further in this type of writing and thinking. It may lead me to creation of an installation of texts and paintings, or finishing a work, which will function as an exhibition in the form of a book. Although I consider myself as a painter and a writer, combining text and image means for me to go beyond a certain taboo. However, since I started to consider my works as emblems, either pictures or texts, this form allows me to experiment with text–image connection without fear of being overly literal. It allows me to rely more on simple textual and visual motifs that have fascinated me for a long time while revealing their hidden meanings.

The residency with all my family in a lockdown proved as a special opportunity to concentrate on my work and to contemplate my life, much more than I would have ever thought. During the first month of our stay everything was closed and I most appreciated the possibility of borrowing books from the ERSTE Foundation library and magazines from tranzit and springerin office. Different examples of autofiction that I had found there created a perfect background for my own writing. I started to write a diary of sorts; a form I like to read but I‘ve always resisted to produce by myself revealed to be a reasonable way how to deal with the lockdown conditions. Additionally I read results of various encounters between artists and theoreticians in Conversational Pieces by If I Can’t Dance I Won’t Be Part of Your Revolution Publishing, I was deeply moved by the book Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, I wondered upon Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures and I read theory and different examples of autofiction in Texte zur Kunst No. 115. And much more. Reading Maggie Nelson drew my attention to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading, which I hadn't known. Ever since my studies of literature I have missed something like that and always wanted to read something like that. After all, I took my time and broke and edited all the sum of text I had produced in Vienna into several precise fragments. I polished them and inserted them into my ongoing project The First Book of Emblems. They threw a new light on the already existing part of the so called book and as such they made me start to edit and to rewrite the whole stuff. This is I guess the most beneficial outcome of my residency in MQ. Plus there is also the simple but important fact we realised that we could live in different conditions as a family and to find new routines, habits and friends. Of course, this was possible only thanks to my partner Ondřej Vinš, who (and his obvious charming tranquillity) accompanied me with our children in Vienna.  In December we enjoyed two weeks of the possibility to visit galleries, museums and even some independent artist-run spaces and we continued exploring Vienna to further find a children friendly and pleasant city.

I would like to express my gratitude to Michaela Geboltsberger and Heide Wihrheim for their care and interest and willingness to meet in outdoors and at playgrounds and for providing contacts to people of the Viennese art scene even in these weird times. Big thanks go to librarian Jutte Breidt for providing the access to the temporarily closed ERSTE Foundation library. I would also like to thank MuseumsQuartier for encouraging us to spend my residency in Vienna as a family and Elisabeth Hajek and Esther Brandl for their kind support. Our hero is artist Paul Petritsch, whose presence, tips and advice just made everything much better.