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4. NATIONAL BAD HABIT COLLECTION FESTIVAL
4. National Collection of Bad Habits Festival
The highlight of the JUST LIKE HIM project is the NATIONAL COLLECTION OF BAD HABITS FESTIVAL, which will take place on the occasion of the 2023 Mendel Festival in the centre of Brno and will be the culmination of the yearlong celebration of the founder of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel. Participants in project from all over the Czech Republic will have a unique opportunity to find their "distant relation" in Brno – that’s what we call individuals who are proud of some of the bad habits that we ourselves have. Through a large-scale participatory event, we will try to rouse the public to action and, by means of their own (prompted) activities, to awaken a permanent change in the ways they conduct themselves.
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The exact format of the event will be inspired not only by the broad collection of bad habits organized into categories, but by the extensive experience of the artist, who has been engaging in social architecture projects for over twenty years and has successfully brought dozens of them to fruition around the world.
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В Чехии создают базу дурных привычек. Жителей просят поделиться своими [Collection of Bad Habits being created in the Czech Republic. Czechs are asked to share their own].
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Artist is building a National Collection of Bad Habits, anyone can submit their own on website České noviny [Czech News], 04/07/2022 09:50
Brno – Award-winning artist Kateřina Šedá is putting together a National Collection of Bad Habits with the help of the public. Anyone can register their own or someone else’s, an individual’s or a family’s bad habit, at www. sbirkazlozvyku.cz. The collection includes, for example, both excessive and deficient cleaning, arriving early and late for meetings, drinking soy sauce, or rummaging through rubbish bins. According to the website, the number of registered bad habits has already exceeded three thousand.
Šédá, sometimes referred to as a social architect, has been working on projects at the crossroads between various art forms and social activism for a long time. She often works with individuals and large groups of people, exploring their relationships and habits. The National Collection of Bad Habits is part of her „Just Like Him” project, which is being developed on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of the founder of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel.
When Šedá was thinking about how she might come to grips with Mendel’s legacy and give contemporary people a better sense of who the man was, she discovered that he was not only a scientist, meteorologist, and beekeeper, but also a heavy smoker. He even left a few burnt tablecloths behind. "It occurred to me that this could be precisely the key. Bad habits are something that accompany each one of us in life. They distinguish us from others, characterize our personality and, paradoxically, also bring us together. So, I decided to create the National Collection of Bad Habits and give people a chance to get to know ’relatives’ they may never have known existed," says Šedá.
She started with the categories "my bad habit" and "someone else’s bad habit." Now she’s also collecting the bad habits of families and whole nation. The inaugural presentation of the collection will take place in three weeks at the 2022 Mendel Festival in Brno. But the project doesn’t end there. Šédá is preparing a „Mendelian Table of Bad Habits,” which will become the basic building block of a labyrinth in which people can search for "relatives" who have similar bad habits.
She herself admits to having a number of bad habits. She says she talks fast and loud, interrupts people in conversations, and thinks everyone else is too slow. The logo of the collection is a reference to a widespread bad habit today: a two-tailed Czech lion with a mobile phone in its paw.
