ABOLISHING PRAGUE
Essays & Interventions

ed. Louis Armand
ISBN 978-80-7308-532-2 (paperback) 240pp
Publication date: November 2014

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Abolishing Prague began as a collaborative urban archaeological project and psychogeographical investigation into the "other" Prague. The current volume represents only a small selection of work belonging to that on-going project: a combination of theoretical, historical, ficto-critical, photo-essayistic and poetic research into the city's parallel dimensions. Abolishing Prague brings together a series of writings on a Prague uncharted by the conventional tourist guide: the Prague of suppressed or forgotten pasts, the amnesiac city of deserted docklands and depopulated islands, the Prague of shabby riverside colonies, a Prague slowly vanishing from the face of the earth, giving way to current urban planning and corporate redevelopment. Topics include Prague's counterculture, brutalist architecture, the work of Karel Teige, Viteslav Nezval, Lukas Tomin, Franz Kafka, as well as "interventions" by contemporary prague-based artists, writers & photographers. Contributors include: Benjamin Tallis, David Vichnar, Ian Mikyska, Michel Delville, Robert Carrithers, Holly Tavel, Vadim Erent, Bonita Rhoads, Karen Pearlman, Dustin Breitling, Vit Bohal, Louis Armand.

"In this lively collection of essays and interventions, readers encounter Prague as a crucial european site of historical and contemporary conversations on modernism, postmodernism, and the potential of the avant-garde to affect change [...] The book refuses a sober academic writing style in favour of revelatory explorations of themes and moments that resonate emotionally for the authors, all of whom communicate a passionate engagement with Prague not only as a built environment, but as an idea and one that has been subjected over and over again through recent history to distortions, disruptions, and erasures. [...] Especially strong are the three chapters by the book's prolific editor, Australian-born Louis Armand [...] and Benjamin Tallis' two strong chapters on the built environment that work against common assumptions about the failures of post-war Communist architecture."
Kimberly Elman Zarecor, JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE (Vol. 24 No. 2: 176-8)

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