Stone Resonances - 2006

STONE RESONANCES OF ZIMBABWE IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Artistic life in the Czech Republic is a blend of art and architecture which explain history and achievement and contemporary painting, graphics, cartoons, and forays into animation which form and create various sub cultures attuned to daily life in a country which values greatly literature and the arts as processes of building. Into this environment in 2006 came Zimbabwe´s stone sculpture through the good offices of His Excellency Jaroslav Olsa Jnr, then Ambassador for the Czech Republic to Zimbabwe, a man who lived Zimbabwe´s cultural and intellectual life to the full, contributing to it on behalf of his country. Ambassador Olsa during his appointment brought people of like minds together in the literary and artistic fields in both Zimbabwe and the Czech Republic. He was a ´close friend´ of the Tengenenge Sculpture Community, organizing competitions for children, visits of Czech film makers and writers; be bought academics and authors in the field of the stone sculpture together in an anthology of articles on the stone sculpture published by the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy in Prague. He was a pioneer in making linkages between the arts, stone sculpture and film, stone sculpture and literature.

Otherwise little known and outside of the normal preoccupations of those engaged in cultural things in the Czech Republic the stone sculpture in the Czech Republic had the excitement of something new, something different, something deserving of study and enquiry. The Tengenenge sculpture at the level of its more symbolic cultural associations and meaning appealed to the Czech people as did its strong attachment to Zimbabwean traditions and spiritual history, and practices, its myths and legends which traditionally have had so much impact on people´s lives and behaviour. The most widely read Czech weekly ´Tydem´ ´Week´ featured a double page spread on Tengenenge, and Ambassador Osla, much at home, in photograph with Tom Blomefield Founder Director of Tengenenge, his white beard fluffing like a cloud in a blue sky, These exhibitions with their written focus on the people who ´made´ the history of the stone sculpture brought the Czech Republic and Africa closer together socially, created a person to person interface. The exhibitions opened out new possibilities for Czech sculptors - to visit Zimbabwe, to see how the bush, the natural environment, stones straight from the mine, and a different sense of their own space might affect their work. In 2007 an exhibition will be held at the National Gallery in Prague to show Zimbabwe´s stone sculpture in all its infinite varieties - and changes, infinitesimal and magnitude.

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