CGD

The project Czechia, which earned Michaela Karásek Čejková a nomination in the category Photographer of the Year, is a guide to the Czech Republic, mainly based on ironic overstatement and an interest in the bizarre phenomena. directly reflected in the project's title. Other authors behind the project are the fashion designer, Kateřina Plamitzerová, and the landscape architect, Lucie Králíková. The title Czechia loosely refers to the two-year old issue of establishing a one-word English name for the Czech Republic, which at that time became a rewarding media topic and elicited a polemic both between professionals and the wider public. The authors traveled together to explore the backwoods of their native country and, from the perspective of the inhabitants of its main metropolis, employed various media to record the local specifics. They focused on the quirky aspects of life in those places, enjoyed their unhealthy, but cheap gastronomy, but also sought the historical background of the individual sites and similarities in the style of dressing. All this served them as a source of inspiration for their fashion designs in the form of modern folk costumes in which they recycled the authentic, site-found or second-hand purchased textiles and which they subsequently photographed on the inhabitants of the particular regions. The first gain of their rather brief sojourns (the first trip was in March 2017) was presented at Designblok in the same year. It was reminiscent of installations present elsewhere throughout regional museums, displaying folk costumes and other objects, such as souvenirs, along with Čejková's documentary photos from her travels and her photographic collages. The author departed from fashion photography to develop her artistic morphology and followed up with her works created during her studies at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The jury was especially captured by her photo of an inhabitant of the village of Mikulášovice – a woman of Asian origin clad in a local folk costume embellished with several pieces of the iconic Czech pocketknife called "rybička" (or, little fish). Czechia here refers to the history of Czech cutlery, which originated exactly in Mikulášovice and in the company Mikov. Čejková does not only faithfully illustrate the traditional craftsmanship but also the atmosphere of the Sudeten. Her photographs from the city of Sušice, for example, feature her fellow-citizens wearing knitted socks with open sandals which there are, in the authors' words, "worn even in summer heatwaves more often than in other parts of Czechia due to the local cold climate".

Monika Čejková