Martin, you have relied on the words of Shakespeare, how do you manage to find a horizontal connection between artistic languages that then become a single creative source in your work?

I believe that the combination of different languages and media, the hybridization, the synthesis is one of the main qualities or main characteristics of contemporary visual art. In my works and exhibitions, I always trust that such a synthesis will occur.
In the case of the Anténa exhibition, it was not the Shakespeare quote that was the starting point, but a discovery in public space in Prague: the antenna of the Bila Labut department store. During the work process, I then broadened my intuitive research and, in this case, discovered the concept of Bohemia by the sea, which can be found not only in Shakespeare, but also in Ingeborg Bachmann and other writers. By combining this fictitious geographical concept with the appropriation of an antenna form from the 1930s and folkloristic ceramics, the fan closes again, bundling the rays back together in the middle, so to speak, and hopefully creating a coherent overall picture, a panorama.

As an artist, would you be able to recognize what’s your obsession? If so, what is it?

I have this instinct that the quality of a work also depends on daring to push certain boundaries with it. These limits are sometimes self-imposed, sometimes imposed by social and aesthetic norms. They can be a matter of visual or formal taste, but also a matter of content. So, I would say that trespassing is an obsession of mine. On the one hand, how I explore boundaries in my own work and cross them. On the other hand, I like to do that also physically: I like to climb over fences or go to places that are outside my comfort zone. That’s where I get materials and ideas for new works.

Olmo, the relationship with the landscape is indeed multifaceted. It intertwines intimacy and collectivism. Taking a specific position within the collective landscape holds political significance and inevitably changes this relationship. What do you think?

The position of Landscape in the construction of the West has been masterfully described by Humboldt and by Timothy Morton to whom I devoted a small solo exhibition in Berlin in 2014. To have chosen and involved a “playful” sculptor like Chramosta is a precise desire: to leap the imagination beyond horror, to propose a dreamlike form as a link between two places (Prague-Palermo). A precise cut: to juxtapose polished metal and terracotta, to the deadly layers of military antennas and hidden sensors. The Sicilian Region, is an extremely polycentric place, an island at the center of the Mediterranean, a place of arrival and emigration. In the mouth of Mount Etna dwells Hephaestus, in Sigonella the drones that kill “the different” in the name of the “bios” of the dominants of the West. In Syracuse and Girgenti the temples. In Palermo the baroque and the power of the official linked in triple hand with the Mafia and the vote of exchange. Each valley boasts a variety of rites and languages not yet fully homegenised.