What is Bio Troja?

In early 2020, we proposed a long-term project titled BIO TROJA: A Place for Composting Culture. The idea came in response to the current state of the environment and was intended as an expression of our awareness of the climate crisis and the worsening environmental sitaution. We would like to use Troja Château, its large gardens, and its immediate surroundings as a laboratory that, thanks to its placement within the landscape and the related social and cultural context, is an ideal place for experts and lay people to meet and work together in the fields of art, music, science, botany, anthropology, and ecology.

With this project, Prague City Gallery is making innovative use of the captivating location that it the city’s Troja neighborhood. The project aims to strengthen and possibly also encourage new forms of collaboration with organizations and individuals, specifically artists and experts in the natural sciences. This active approach to thinking about environmental contexts has shown itself to be an important undertaking today, not just in art, culture, and the economy, but in life in general.

The project’s title, BIO TROJA: A Place for Composting Culture, was inspired by the processes we are describing, for instance fermentation. Fermentation is everywhere in nature, and on the metaphorical level in society as well. Without it, our world would quickly collapse. Thanks to the action of microbial enzymes (fermenters), fungi, and lichens, organic substances are slowly transformed into the building blocks for new forms of life. Fermentation is also present in practical fields such as the production of alcoholic drinks, vinegar, yeast, cheeses, butter, yogurt, bread, pickling processes (pickles, cabbage), and the production of starch, organic acids, amino acids, etc. Fermentation is used to clean wastewater or oil spills, for silage, in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, to soften flax… Fermentation and composting are not just a chemical and physical process, but also an element of society and culture.

 

Partners and cooperators
Agosto Foundation
Asociace MLOK
Artbiom
Ekoškolka Rozárka
HAENKE
Jan Trejbal – Neolokátor
National Museum