Tomas Chadim

Ústí nad Labem region is a region deeply marked by its history, especially by two events that forever distorted the established color of the landscape. Coal mining and the displacement of the original German population after World War II. The first led to the devastation of the once beautiful landscape and to the massive infiltration of heavy industry into the landscape. The second then disrupted the continuity of the relationship of local people to the landscape, property and land. These conditions formed a unique industrial landscape, set between the panorama of the Central Highlands, the Ore Mountains and the Doupovské Mountains. The ruin and decline of a once prosperous region. But also hidden visual poetry. Abandoned industrial buildings alternate with contemporary industrial development. All this characterizes this region and distinguishes it from the rest of the Czech landscape. The photographs in this book were not taken by a person. The photographer is a robotic camera placed on the roof of a car of an Internet map provider. So I am just an editor. This book is a kind of poetic analysis of the industrial landscape of northwestern Bohemia. However, the book does not answer the question of how people live in this landscape.

Walls, three towers. All this on a rock above the valley. Kašperk Castle is the highest castle in the Czech Republic. But the castle itself plays a secondary role in this book. The important thing happens in the Šumava valleys and ridges west of it. This piece of the planet captured by a web camera located on the higher of the two towers of Kašperk Castle is in constant motion. Every five minutes another picture. No two moments are the same. Time passes at its own pace here. It brings and takes away storms, snowfalls and fogs. It creates strange, sometimes even dramatic scenes and moves the sunset across the horizon from left to right and back in the annual cycle.

Milky Way (Triptych, 2023)

Q: What is the one fact about the universe that blows your mind the most?

One is just the size and scale of it. I mean, in the piece of the universe we can see there are something like roughly 2 trillion galaxies. We haven‘t counted them all but that’s an estimate based on surveys of the local universe. Two trillion, 2,000 billion galaxies. And each galaxy is, let’s say, around the size of the Milky Way. Some are bigger, some are smaller, but the Milky Way has 400 billion stars in it. It takes light over 100,000 years to cross a galaxy. And there are 2 trillion of them in the piece of the universe we can see. And we are very sure that that piece that we can see is a small bit of what may be an infinite universe beyond; we don’t know actually.

And I always say, you know, don’t get worried about that, because nobody can picture it. It is impossible to visualize the scale of the universe.

Astrophysicist Brian Cox

Huge logistics centers, monstrous ports, industrial agglomerations—Tokyo, Osaka, Los Angeles, Antwerp, and others. These are not particularly beautiful places. Dust, noise, concrete, pipes, tanks, conveyor belts, and above all, vastness. Only a view from a sufficient height reveals their hidden beauty. However, as the Ever Given ship accident in 2021 demonstrated us, they are also an integral part of the vulnerable system of global logistics, the global economy, and the world as a whole.

... and finally... I've probably found the real center of the Zone... its very core! So quiet, so peaceful!

Time slowed down here, the space was being divided, I could feel a concentration of energy here – energy either collapsed into the gateways, or vice versa pulsed out. The places were really weird.

The Planet as it existed here a hundred thousand years ago.  It was covered by deep dense forest, and to be precise, right here in the central part of one continent. Forests were waiting for the very first human beings – for immigrants from another continent of the same Planet. Those animals – human beings – came and will one day disappear again. They leave only scars in the landscape, which are gradually healed by the forest itself. Once again, it is returning to being an unnamed Planet.

We're a bit like insects. We are ubiquitous. And sometimes there comes an intense swarming = a concentration of our power. However, unlike insect communities, the swarming of our community misses one single goal, a clear intent and also unified vision. Simply put, we miss swarm intelligence.

They are everywhere. They are sticking out all over the Czech landscape. Antennas, transmission towers, water reservoirs, gas storage tanks, floodlights, billboards, concrete plants, cooling towers, cranes and other technological structures. Take a walk through the countryside. It's like you almost can't find a single place unoccupied by at least one of these structures. We are by nature aggressive beings, extensively violating the landscape. Yet I find all these structures profoundly fascinating, and highly attractive, for we are not only invasive beings, but also creative.