Václav Fiala

"And so it happened that my wife Sylvia and I spent about ten days inside the institution, living there among the disabled clients. It was an incredible time. It still resonates with me. And I built a bell tower about seven meters high. When it was finished, the director came in and said there should be a bell. - 'I make bell towers that are waiting for a bell, whether you put it in or not, that's your business.' He managed to get a dad, who had his son there, to pay for the bell. But we didn't get on very well with the bell founder, he wanted to put a Moravian eagle on it. I told him that it should have some big message on it - maybe something written by the Holy Father or the Dalai Lama. He laughed at me a bit, and that provoked me. It took me about three weeks to get hold of the Dalai Lama's email and write to him. Five days later - it gives me goosebumps when I think about it - an email appeared and in the subject line at the top was [written] HHDL - His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The secretary wrote to me saying that His Holiness was touched. He never quotes himself but his guru from the 6th century and he is sending a four line stanza. It was written in English: 'I want to be in this world for as long as possible so that I can help take the suffering off the backs of living beings.' And at the bottom was a note: 'His Holiness apologizes to you for answering after five days, our computer was broken.'"

"As I mentioned, we lived at the bottom edge of Klatovy Square, and there was a Renaissance house across the corner, with the historical pharmacy ‘At the White Unicorn‘ downstairs. The Bolsheviks had it renovated in the 1980s because they wanted to build a museum of the workers' movement and revolutionary traditions in the Klatovy region. So there were new showcases, large photos of Gottwald and other rubbish. In November 1989 I got a call from a friend of mine who was a maintenance man there. He was referring to a talk I had given there a few months earlier, at which I had said that the house would make a beautiful gallery. So he told me that he had the keys and if I still had the gallery idea. I said, surely I did. I went to Klatovy, we occupied the house and started the White Unicorn Gallery. But it wasn't that easy. We were the revolutionaries who occupied the building, but it still belonged to somebody - the institution of the Museum and Gallery of Klatovy, and it didn't want to give it up. We had disputes with them. And then I wrote a huge sign on the building: 'Paris has Centre Pompidou, Klatovy has the White Unicorn.' We had a lot of fun. First we occupied the mazhaus [the front room in an old house, trans.] and had a topical political exhibition on events of November 1989, various well-known photographers gave me photographs, then an exhibition on the year 1968. Naturally, this evolved into a gallery dedicated to documentary photography. Then we occupied the first floor and started to do art exhibitions, then group exhibitions in the next floor and sound exhibitions in the underground. So four exhibitions opened parallelly in one building. The gallery then became a state gallery and merged with the collection gallery in Klenová. It already had a statute - and that was not so exciting anymore - there had to be an economist, a director. So we slowly withdrew. And the gallery has been working ever since there."