Planet Prague unfolds the story of Prague’s nature in a different way than we are used to. Instead of focusing on the Divoká Šárka or the Prokopské Valley, it rather depicts tales from bushes in housing estates, neglected courtyards, and peed on corners. It observes the city through the “eyes” of plants and animals: How do they perceive the pavements, station platforms, street lamps or cracks in the facade? How do they use the environment that people have built for themselves? How many “inhabitants” does Prague actually have?
The panoramic projection in the Black Hall is an imaginary window into selected Prague “biotopes” – from the Prague steppe, the urban jungle, and the pond in the park to an ordinary sidewalk and a summer night in Petřín. Visitors to the exhibition become field researchers who discover the hidden life of Prague’s nature through unique movie footage. The virtual reality installation leads visitors to a future Prague without people – fish breed in the flooded metro, a dense oak forest flourishes in the center, and herds of wild pigs roam among the ruins of buildings. This is also what Prague may look like in a hundred years. Visitors can see the succession (i.e. the cycle of changing communities in the ecosystem) “working” in the atrium. The neat living area has been transformed into a wild open-air laboratory; a small urban jungle where several plant species take turns in the struggle for living space during the six months of the exhibition. Which one will win in the end?
Reliable guides through the “jungle” of the big city are expert consultants, without whom the exhibition would not have been created. Therefore, the exhibition shows everything that belongs in their profession and fieldwork – tools, photographs, sketches, illustrations, notes, and notebooks, as well as finds from expeditions into the urban nature. Thus, visitors to CAMP can see, for example, the sleeping bag of botanist Jan Albert Šturma in which he spends his nights in the urban bush, a model of an anthill used by documentary filmmaker Jan Hošek to peek into the “kitchen” of ants, or the insect net of zoologist Ondřej Sedláček because even in the 21st century, “entomology simply cannot be done without a net”. The exhibition is complemented by a rich accompanying program. In addition to guided tours, visitors can engage in observation of urban nature directly in the field or attend thematic movie screenings. Lectures and debates focus on how the urban landscape and nature can be cared for and, among other things, present the work of experts from the Prague Institute of Planning and Development (IPR Prague), the Department of Environment of the Prague City Hall, and other institutions.
