Base in Prokop Valley

An independent artistic center dedicated to encounters, festivals, creative workshops, and the nurturing of artistic practice as such. The former shepherd's cottage, set on the slope of Prokop Valley above the Dalejský stream, was inhabited in the 1950s by the family of the watchmaker Cipro—a kind man still fondly remembered by those who knew him. In the 1990s, the house served as a center for environmental education. For nearly the past two decades, it has been cared for by the informal collective Teď nádech a leť as a place for "sustaining the human need to be good and for enriching life through art and uplifting encounters."

The outer wall bears the words of Andrei Tarkovsky on the essence of art and the vocation of the artist:
"Beauty is a symbol of truth—not truth in the sense of true or false, but truth as a path along which a human being moves. Art is a movement toward truth, and truth is always profoundly beautiful."

Above the entrance appears a line by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz:
"The garment of the epoch fell from me, and I found myself in a landscape of people long forgotten."

The idea underlying the existence of the cottage in Prokop Valley also resonates with a passage by Bruno Schulz from The Republic of Dreams:
"It was to be a fortress, a bunker, a fortified place dominating its surroundings—half stronghold, half theatre, half visionary laboratory. Within its frame, the whole of nature was to be encompassed. This theatre, as in Shakespeare, would extend into nature without boundary, grow into reality, receive impulses and inspiration from all the elements, and move in the rhythm of the great tides and ebbs of natural cycles. Here was to be the intersection of all processes coursing through the vast body of nature; here were to enter all the plots and events dreamed by its great, mist-laden soul."