Return My Ostrava
  Fly-traps

Once I watched a fly caught in a fly-trap, and I began to see this small insect tragedy as a performance expressing the Ostrava problem directly. A fly-trap is positioned in the middle of the room, where the flies are most likely to encounter it, and it attracts the insects by its scent, which suggests the presence of honey or sugar. The fly, thus deceived, is caught, and from that moment all its efforts are in vain. The only way to achieve freedom is to tear off its limbs. I realised that this situation expresses my own relationship with my home city – I curse it, I hate it, I despise it, yet on the other hand I fear that any real attempt to escape from this place would tear out that which is at my core – my soul. The city tortures human souls that stay here too. It catches them on its conveyor belt fly-traps and takes them underground to the basement, where it torments them and destroys them in hundreds of ways, then it spits them out at the surface to rest and catch their breath for the next round. The reward for this tortuous process is coal – a compound of the simple chemical symbol C – carbon. Human lives are thus gradually reduced to the element C. People signed away their souls to the black devil – but what is the chemical formula of the soul, that well-hidden core of each person? Of course it is the same C – but the question is whether the soul is coal or a diamond, that crystal-clear stone which all of those hopeless conveyor-belted denizens of this city possess in their heart of hearts, whether they know it or not. A diamond – the beauty and rarity of transcendent coal. While coal is measured in tonnes, diamonds are weighed out in grammes, but the chemical basis of both materials is the same. When installed, a diamond becomes a symbol of the true value of human life, the life of those people on the conveyor belts, the life which here in Ostrava is expressed in tonnes and cubic metres. When we gouge the last coal out of the ground and the city reverts to desert, the people will leave behind only empty seams and cavities, because human activity has focused only on chunks of fossil fuel and not on a perfect, clear crystal – the soul, the only thing which gives value to human life.