Outsiders

The mini-drama “Outsiders” is about the topics, projects and activities of the creative duo Šimonová – Mráčková.

Markéta Mráčková and Barbora Šimonová met at Emil Přikryl’s School of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. They have been working as a creative duo since 2013. They founded the cultural cooperative cosa.cz in 2016 to join together their diverse activities – architecture, visual arts, literature and video. The reason why the cultural cooperative cosa.cz was founded was that its creators wanted to offer an alternative to the system of independent architectural tradesmen.

They favour a sentence from the beginning of the book Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco that is taken from Boscoe Pertwee: “I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure.” This quote defines them so well that they have borrowed it and modified it into the title of a collection of Ukrainian stories “I Used to Think I Cannot Orientate Myself, But Now I Am Lost.” Very apt is also a Tolstoy’s note to his book War and Peace: “I have written thus far only about princes, counts, ministers, senators and their children, and I fear that henceforth there will be no other characters in my story. (…) I cannot understand what a cow is thinking when she is being milked, or what a horse thinks when she is pulling a barrel.”

In their work they reflect what they themselves experience.

Photo: Jonáš Kolařík