Jiří Voves

“I wasn’t on National Avenue, I happened to be here (in Zadní Kopanina) with a friend. Majda came in the evening and informed us. Of course, we quickly put in a few shots, and then we did what we could within Prague. It was nice and euphoric, and we all deserved it. As I mentioned before, there is some connection, when I was full of optimism in 1968, I remember telling Dad, completely naïvely trying to persuade him, using all those big words, that they can’t do anything with the whole nation. And then they did, in two years. But to be honest, not with everyone. So the euphoria after 1989 was also somewhat tempered.”

“I had a friend, Zdeněk Kirchner was his name, a painter. He should never have emigrated, he was a person who loved Prague, loved Prague pubs, and he was the type of person who couldn’t live without it. He never learnt French, and he was never allowed to come visit back here, and he had left his mother here and no one else. When he died, because I knew that (Pavel) Tigrid knows him and (Jiří) Kolář knows him, so Tigrid was really glad, he said he would be very glad. At the time he was minister of culture, and he said: ‘Yeah, bring it here, and I’ll prepare you some paper for the borders.’ His whole legacy, because he had made it there, he was in some group, but he didn’t make much of a name for himself, but otherwise his work was really compact. There was a whole studio of things and a warehouse there, so I was going to bring it here, and either we’d manage to get it into some collections here, or something would be done with it, but if it stayed there it’d just rot. Well, so I drove to Paris. When we crossed the borders, the customs officer leafed through the papers of what we were bringing, and I said that he’d certainly have something from the ministry of culture. He said that he had nothing of the sort, and after a brief calculation he worked it out to some 1.5 million [crowns] in duty. I said: ‘But wait up, we’re rescuing valuable things here, this isn’t any business. It’s with the minister’s approval.’ The enlightened officer understood and said: ‘Look, if that’s how it is, I’ll give you some advice, the only way is a civic society. That way we’ll let you through.’ (Q: So you established a civic society at the borders.) No, no, no, not like that. He said: ‘I’ll give you a week, I’ll keep the stuff here.’ So he let us though with that we had to establish a civic society, and then it could go through customs the standard way. So we did that, and everything they required, we did it. We called the civic society Memory [Czech: Paměť], and that was that. That’s how we came to found the civic society Memory, and with it Studio Memory, because some friends received a house in Truhlářská Street in restitution, and they gave us the cellars to use for the collections...”

“The Sixties and that time of studies was the period when a village boy came (I was always afraid of Prague) and was thrilled. I think the Sixties were the most amazing period because the age was right. In that year 1963 and throughout my studies, this generation was in luck because everything began to open up in a wonderful way. There were amazing films, a wave of Czech films, amazing books were published, Divadlo Na zábradlí [Theatre on the Railings] started, as did Viola, Reduta, Jazz, everything. And now suddenly I found myself in Prague and I had all of this at my fingertips. It was amazing. The atmosphere was awfully important to us, as well as the environment and the new possibilities. So it was a period when we didn’t study much, we flunked it a lot, but not always. To begin with we were completely taken by it. Then there were the May Day celebrations. The Sixties were really intense. You could travel, they began tolerating trips abroad for students with invitations. Honestly, we always got a letter from someone outside, we wrote an invitation into it in the pub and took it to the cops, and they gave us a stamp that we were free to go.”

“I then left the Academy and had to do my military service. But to begin with that seemed pretty nice because I managed to get myself into the Army Arts Studio in Prague, which was like a normal job. But I wasn’t there for long. In those Sixties, and especially in ’68, we were pretty active students and we were signing everything we could. So as I was coming to the art studio one morning, like to work, two men drove up, sat me down, and said I’d be coming with them; they took one other friend of mine and put us into a car. When we asked what was going on, they just retorted ‘you’ll be informed’, they took us to Juliska and closed us up in some room. There were some fifteen soldiers there already. They took our army tops, didn’t tell us a thing, left us there for some twenty-four hours, and then herded us into a bus in the night (still without telling us anything) and began taking us to various garrisons, as we realised. We kept driving from barracks to barracks, and so-and-so is to get out, so-and-so should get out. Well, and my friend and I were dropped off (we didn’t yet know where we were, but we found out soon enough) at the barracks in Jince. That was a combat unit, and they were doing some purge and they had found out that there were some students who had signed this, this, and this, and they made them into unreliables. That was fine, we were unreliable. Well, so they split us up among the various units, and I ended up lucky because Jince weren’t far away.”