Bohemiae Color

Colour is nothing less than the embodiment of the world.
Each tone of the spectrum,
in subtle shades from black to black,
is likewise part of the entire universe,
of the scent of ozone, like a memory of the lightning flash,
framed by the rainbow’s arch.

Bohemiae color
The territory of the Bohemian basin, the Czech Republic, Bohemice is - not only thanks to its geological formation - an exceptional place, indicated on ancient maps as the blossom of a rose ar as the heart of all Europe. It is a place with memory, recorded here in the red of the first rays of dawn, or of blood. It is a centre. The Czech Republic is a prism where the convergence of the lines of force from the landscapes of Europe are dispersed into a gigantic palette of the shades of its sands, soils, slates, micas, tuffs, and granites. We can say that the heart of Europe is in actual fact multi-coloured and opalised. Such a colour scale is not merely the reality of the country, but equally its fully valid symbol, in its diversity pointing the way to the future. It is our wealth in the most intimate sense of the word.
This sum total of colours is a good ambassador, bearing the open tidings of the entire Earth.

The skin of Bohemia
The shell is to surround the entire building of the Czech Embassy in London and partially even intervene in the fac;:ade of the extant administrative building now being divided. It represents an unmistakable yet very subtly ~ articulated language, and we hope the language will be open and comprehensible, both thanks to its universal meaning as well as the uniqueness of the historic and local bonds through which these meanings were formed. This is the message of the Bohemire Color skin for the Czech Embassy in London. Presenting this idea in London, of all places, in a society so deeply yet complexly linked to tradition, could be a good beginning for a view towards the future. It could be a reminder, or even a trans-romantic attempt newly to grasp and comprehend the "spi rit of the nation" that perhaps today we may also term national identity. Words - the names of various places and towns, the expression of the linguistic memory of peoples and their existence there - can be linked to the concrete entities of these places, exposed in the shell of the building to new correspondences, new memories. The shell is in its own way the fragment of an archive that could well become "an institutionalised platform offering a common memory" as well as a museum of Bohemiae Color par excellence. The abstract and fragmentised conception of a fac;:ade fixed in stone, whose "solidity" is "entrusted" to two panels of fragile glass, thus recalls the form of a transparent, yet in fact nearly impervious shell; a shell bearing many meanings and references: The colour tones of stones, soils, c1ays, loess, ochres, phyliths, micas or dusts are among the most permanent matters that the human eye and experience know. The entropic colour of the universe is dark red, similar to that of human blood. The vegetative colour of life is green, and since its essence is the process of photosynthesis, green as well is caught in the ceaseless alteration of black and white. Blue is the colour of space, the manifestation of layers, layerings and echoes. The mirrored glass panels of the shell offer the psychology of the human gaze a com plete palette of these symptoms of lived reality, even though it may be a mere selection. They are part of the skin that also forms part of our own bodies, and we only see our bodies in the way that we do having behind us historic memory.

Roman Koucky / Šárka Malá / Miloš Šejn