A space for gardening, cultivating, playing and art.
In a garden, a keyhole bed is a small space for an individual, yet a big space for gaining knowledge and inter-species experience. A Keyhole in a gallery is a place where daylight enters the fortress of knowledge. It is the interface between what’s inside and outside, and a place for the spontaneous activities of visitors and the programme activities of the gallery.
The space – which is something between a garden workshop, a shed and an exhibition hall, and to which we dedicated one of PLATO’s exhibition rooms for two years – is both directly and indirectly linked to the garden that runs on both sides of the gallery.
This space is where you can find artistic game elements that can be used to interact with, and to gain knowledge about, our permaculture garden: a map and an oracle. When removing an element from the map of a garden, it is recommended to insert it, meaning to compost it, in the oracle. The final divination which you will receive through this act directly addresses the real world and is thus a connection between art and real activity, between interior and exterior, theory and practice.
It's a place where you can experience many things: planting, drawing, lounging with books on sustainable activities, and getting to know garden-related art. You can also sign up to a course on permaculture and meet the guests of the garden as well as the gardeners. You can also get your hands dirty in the soil and treat yourself to the serotonin-releasing encounter with Mycobacterium vaccae, the beneficial bacteria of happiness. Our young(est) audience can spend a pleasant day here with their family or come with their classmates to an educational programme that also involves planting vegetables and flowers.
The first exhibition, Silent Arrangement, which opens at the same time as the Keyhole, is a series of objects by artist and florist Anna Ročňová.
Vojtěch Radakulan graduated from Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and from the Studio of Sculpture at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, also in Prague. He is currently a postgraduate student at Czech Technical University. He was a finalist of the 2022 Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Radakulan uses game environment as a critical tool for reflecting on digital and physical reality and on where the borders between the two have already collapsed.
Note: In permaculture gardening – and the PLATO garden is built according to those principles – the term “keyhole” refers to the shape of a garden bed enlarging the edges of cultivated space, thus creating a space for more diversity, since the greatest diversity of species can be found where the edges of two and more ecosystems meet.