PAVEL STEREC (* 1985) studied in 2004-2006 at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology in the Performance Studio. In 2006-2012 he studied in several studios at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He completed his doctoral studies in 2016 at the Prague UMPRUM in the Studio of Photography. From 2015 to 2021 he was the head of the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the BUT. In his dissertation "The Politics of Art Research, the Bologna Process and Critical Art Practice", he focused on the process of establishing art research in the unifying space of European universities and investigated where the institutional demands for art research originated. The work was supervised by art historian Milena Bartlová.

In his artistic practice Pavel Sterec combines performance, object, installation, photography, and other media. He is interested in research, science, archival research and the exploration of social structures. He can be classified as one of a wave of artists with a deep interest in social environment. He often raises the question of the artist's dependence on their own skills of craft, forms of authorship and collaboration. He was twice nominated for the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (in 2011 and 2015). In 2011, he participated in the competition with his project Two Small Intersections on a Big Vertical. In 2015 he worked with data from the Virtual Anthropology Laboratory at Masaryk University for the final exhibition.

Pavel Sterec also writes and publishes in journals such as A2 and Alarm. The result of his research in the field of literature is the book Sediments of Wellness Diagnosis, published by the publishing house Host and FFA. The text by a collective of authors from the Intermedia Studio at FFA Brno under the direction of Pavel Sterec was staged as a production of the same name by the HaDivadlo theatre in Brno. It was the final production of HaDivadlo's 45th season, which was dedicated to the theme of Sources and which was interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. The centre of the production was a non-theatrical text, which has now been transformed into a book. His collaboration with HaDivadlo is of a more permanent nature and its most recent output so far is the radio play "Nikola 2030, 2045, 2080", which is part of the theatre's repertoire.

Both theoretical starting points and the way we relate to artistic work change over time. Of course, the expectations I had when going into art starting art school were different than the ones I have now. I'm currently engaged a lot in theory or theories that relate to post-art, and I've long been interested in, say, the role of the artist in interdisciplinary research. In my dissertation at UMPRUM I explored the political dimension or potential of artistic research. So I moved from conceiving art as something autonomous and associated with a privileged role and uniqueness to seeing art in a broader relation not only to other disciplines, but situating it and dealing with its margins, though in a different sense than the modernist one. To look for what else art can be. It's not a game of where to stick the stake and saying we've reached some other frontier. It's about dealing with the margin as a place that merges with other areas.

It should be mentioned that it was a practical doctorate. Of course it had a theoretical part, but it was important how I combined theory with artistic practice. I was able to answer the research questions thanks to several artistic or practical projects that went along with it. Anyway, I wondered why there was a big wave of interest in artistic research at the time I started my PhD studies. There were an awful lot of foreign publications coming out, and there was enormous support for art research projects in the Czech Republic. There was a tendency to somehow theoretically strengthen it and include it in the space of universities. I wanted to take advantage of this interest in artistic research rather than to define myself against it, because it was close to my heart. In my practice, I had already somehow intuitively felt a lot of things that I then encountered when reading theoretical texts. Suddenly, I was comfortable with it, but I also suspected where the institutional support for artistic research actually comes from. I wasn't used to studying documents like those related to the Bologna Process, for example. But then, through texts and through other people, I came to understand how the term artistic research was brought into the unifying space of universities and where lay the need to justify it. To oversimplify, there was an unintended confluence of two demands. A doctoral degree was created in all schools with no exception, including schools where science is not taught. At the same time, there was a requirement that the doctoral degree should always be linked to research. I daresay that this was indeed unintended. These two parallel demands then had to result in some kind of starting point, which was that it had to be possible to do non-scientific research, and that this had to be done in order to prevent such research from being done poorly in other than scientific schools. Suddenly, at least on paper, this equalized the role of non-scientific research. I think this is a big step not only for the arts, but also in general, and it has a lot of possible implications or potentials. It should be embraced as a fundamental change, because such a shift can change a lot of things even politically. 

It fundamentally changed me, because up until that point, although I was interested in science and research and topics in scientific disciplines or fields, I have to say that I really rather aestheticized them. I didn't really know how to work with institutions, and moreover, the institutions, when I approached them, saw the role of the artist more in terms of popularizing the organization, which might be nice, but there was nothing else. It wasn't the fault of the scientific institutions, but overall there wasn't an awareness that working with an artist can go more in-depth. In addition, there weren't even the tools by which that closer collaboration could take place. All of a sudden opportunities opened up because artistic research became more equal. In my practical dissertation projects, I tried different ways to convert the RIV points for the RUV ones. Specifically, I worked with the Czech Geological Survey, which was required to have its staff publish and collect RIV points. However, the subject of their research is very slow long-term processes, and fulfilling the publication requirements is thus more difficult. So I granted them co-authorship of my artwork and they were able to earn RIV points. These opportunities have also changed over time, and it would certainly be more difficult today, but there have been other motivations to collaborate with an artist. Institutions suddenly began to accept that collaboration could be more than just taking a picture or filming something somewhere. This has been further exacerbated by the fact that the Academy of Sciences, with whom I work a lot now, has collaboration as one of the requirements for all projects that are developed there. First of all, it's the collaboration between different institutes, but there's also the pressure for the outputs of the projects to be applied. An exhibition is one of the possible applications of the research and it seems to be easier than some other applications. And that suddenly became a field where I could start to move in and where they also needed to some extent to collaborate with someone who had experience of exhibition practice and could help them to produce that type of output. It means that your partners will give you the results of their project not only for you to choose the font and figure out how to print it on the exhibition panels, but that some of them will realize that if they want to think of the exhibition as a medium in its own right, it requires a deeper collaboration. So I've been exploiting for a long time some of the cracks that arise in the system, some of the unintended consequences, and it started at the PhD level, but at the same time I'm excited about the fact that these cracks allow for a deeper transformation in the approach to the knowledge that art can integrate. 

It was very important for me that during my studies I started to work a lot with sociologist Tereza Stöckel. She invited me to a doctoral seminar that was held at the Centre for Theoretical Studies at the Academy of Sciences. She ran the seminar with Zdeněk Konopásek, who is also a sociologist, a Latourian, and there I had the opportunity to discuss my project. I have to say that I was very shy at first, because there were PhD students from the sciences there, and I was nervous and scared to even talk to them about their projects, let alone share mine. Gradually, Tereza Stöckelová helped me to overcome this often needless fear of dialogue. I then read more texts by, for example, Latour or Ingold, where the role of artist is explained in a relatively understandable and accessible way. And with that a certain type of self-confidence grows. Although it has to be said that artists often have too much self-confidence.

When we talked about the aestheticization of science and the relationship to appropriation, it was quite common for artists to feel that they could take the result of anyone's scientific work, turn it into a work of art, not even understand it, not care if it was a misinterpretation from the point of view of the person who did the research, just appropriate it that way. Fortunately, that approach is changing a little bit now. It used to annoy a lot of people in science that somebody would just come along, create something completely different based on their years of scientific work, and then give interviews about it. So the relationship was problematic. Suddenly it became clear, also thanks to the theorists, that I don't have to just take something and transfer it from the field of science to the field of culture, but that it can be a two-way dialogue. And that as an artist I should always think about what I'm giving to the scientist or the scientific team, and it doesn't have to be just science. At the same time, the progressive role of artistic research is that it can acknowledge some, say, indigenous research in an area that has been studied by anthropologists and ethnologists. Indigenous research has not had the same weight, but it can be enormously beneficial because it comes from a deeper relationship to a particular environment. In the same way, there is undoubtedly research that is done by people who work manually or in crafts. They have a relationship to a material that is quite different from a scientific relationship. Collaboration can take place between people doing artistic research and scientific research, but it can equally be collaboration between multiple entities of non-scientific research. Going in that direction would be of great interest to me in the future, because so far scientific institutions have seemed to be friendliest only to collaboration with arts and artistic research. 

Through my contact with collaborators and the people who supervised me during my PhD studies, I became familiar with methodological approaches that, while not directly transferable to the field of art, are very useful to know. They allow me to better define what I don't have to do because someone else has already done it or will do it better. So at the very least I know that I should base my method on something that is not in opposition to scientific inquiry, but that can complement it in some way. What is crucial for me is in one of Labour’s texts. He writes that, unlike scientists, artists are much more used to seeing relationships in a complex way. They know that the perception of a work of art is affected by whether it hangs on the wall of this or that gallery and has this or that light shining on it and whether this or that type of person goes there. He also gives an example of the experience of a concert, where it is impossible to distinguish whether it is created by the virtuosity of one player or another, or the conductor, or by the concert hall, or by the expectation with which people go there. In scientific work, with its methodological demands, it is much more difficult to perceive this complexity of relationships. This is where the experience of the artist can be beneficial. I actually do all my projects with some collaborators and gradually leave the individual artistic creation. This makes it easier for me to define my space in collaboration. I don't always collaborate with scientists, sometimes with other artists. There, I can use, for example, their material sensitivity and work on my own with what I would call the integration of different looks into myself. I have specialized in that to a certain extent [smile], although it is precisely those intersections that I specialize in. I've done several exhibitions with the Academy of Sciences in this way, and it's certainly not that I'm just the architect of the exhibition, but I'm involved in the whole thing from the initial stages of the project. For example, I collaborate with the Institute of Sociology, and I've done projects with the Centre for Theoretical Studies and the Institute of Art History and the Institute of Music, for example. Cooperation among institutes in this area is in high demand. This is very important for me at the moment, also in terms of creative activities. Similarly, I am now collaborating on some texts or in theatre with Ivan Buraj and the Hadivadlo Theatre. In the play that I wrote together with FFA students, we used a method called "verbatim", which refers to documentary theatre. We selected people representing the viewpoints we wanted to have represented and recorded interviews with them. We then transcribed those and later turned them into characters in the play, but even there I used a lot of what I do elsewhere. The people who were invited there were from different disciplines or had that experience behind them. So it is projected into everything I do.  

I see individual work as something that is and will always be primary for a certain type of artist, and I certainly wouldn't want to talk anyone out of it. But at the same time, I think a lot of it is just about the business of art and about the artist becoming a kind of brand. You can see it well in the contrast between video art and standards in film, for example, where collaboration is much more acknowledged. You usually have the artist's name behind the video, because the video is sold as the work of an individual, but at the same time there are many, sometimes dozens of people collaborating on it. Nowadays, even in sculpture making, there are a number of people involved in the workshops who model these things, and either they are acknowledged as co-authors or they are not. And I'm interested now in acknowledging that and not making a distinction whether someone is an artist and therefore he can put his signature on it. If we start to acknowledge the collectivity of the work, then we should acknowledge both the theoretical resources and the people who had an input, even in the form of maybe some consultation, as well as those who contributed with production and knowledge and skills, such as working with technology and materials. All the projects I'm doing are collective now - even the ones that I could sign as being only mine, but I don't want to do that.

Certainly. As I mentioned, I think the equalisation of artistic research has a lot of consequences, it also makes the role of the expert more uncertain. The scientist is no longer the only expert. Suddenly, it can turn out that there are different actors who play a crucial role and carry knowledge. It's definitely related to the way participatory research is developing and also what is called public science. Ideally, I would imagine that artistic researchers open the door to public science and show that someone who has no formal training in a field can make a significant contribution to the production of knowledge through their insight. And that research projects can already be designed so that this input is there.  

I feel that when scientists become familiar with the possibilities of collaboration with artists, through artistic research or through participation in collaborative research in an interdisciplinary team, then they gain experience that opens the way to public science, where the artist no longer plays a privileged role. I think it's good to strive for that, because being an artist should be as important as other important human activities. Certainly the status of the artist, like that of the scientist, should not be adored too much and be put on a pedestal. Public science is great for expanding this field. So that's one of the political implications that it has. And science can be committed too, so committed artistic research is another thing. And that can also be done together with some civic initiatives and movements. Fortunately, scientists are now getting more involved in these issues, and they are also becoming more aware that politics is also connected to science.

We have just finished a novel together and I have written a drama and some essays in the Future anthology. I write about the future of art there. I write some essays for the Prostor journal, and I see those as a kind of creation, a reflection through text on something I've created in a visual medium. It's often the case that when I have a project and I do research in the field, I take notes or make photographic documentation, video documentation, or conduct interviews, and only then I decide what will come out of that and in what medium. Often it's also the case that there's a text and a video and something else, and the text doesn't just describe the video or the exhibition, but is one of the components.

I am an employee of the Prague Social Services Centre in a shelter with a nursing service for homeless people who suffer from a more serious illness. An illness that makes it impossible for them to be in a standard shelter and basically not even on the street, because it would be incompatible with their survival. Martin Freund became its director and tried to, say, humanize it. Part of that was also the activation and art therapy work that I started to do there along with my work as a social services worker.

I participated in the social struggle against the poverty merchant on Markéta Kuncová Street in a notorious house that was rented to low-income people under very problematic conditions. There, for several years, we tried to change the situation. Martin Freund was also involved in that, and we know each other from there. And then when he came to Prague, he gave me this offer. 

Specifically, these people have reached a situation where they can no longer continue with the way of life they were used to. At the same time, their basic needs are met in a material sense in this facility. They have medical treatment, a shelter and food, so they suddenly get into a situation where they become fully aware of their situation, which is often quite hopeless, and there is a decompensation and they fall into a deeper depression. On the streets they had to exert a lot of energy to survive at all, and all those activities allowed them to forget or not think about the plight they were in. It is necessary to work with them on this aspect as well, to give them some type of time filling. That is why it is mainly about activation, which does not necessarily mean that it is art therapy. We were developing different types of activities there. We were looking at how they could get more involved in the running of the house as well. 

And then I came up with a programme that I'm now building on elsewhere, because I'm going to leave off here. It's a project where these people are taken to different types of cultural productions. I took them to theatre performances, which often they hadn't experienced for decades. And just some kind of removal from their difficult situation was very important to them. Part of the process was not just creating and engaging in the running of the house so that they had a meaningful activity, but it was also about them becoming users of culture again.

It continues, of course, with the means that are possible at the moment, which is pretty much reduced. At the moment I'm mainly writing. I've continued to work with the HaDivadlo theatre since I left FFA. My most recent output is the radio play "Nikola 2030, 2045, 2080", which is still running now, and then I'm mainly working on my own texts. 

I still see it in the context of fine art. I can't write but from my own experience. I don't exhibit now, so this is the type of work that is possible. 

Although I agree that artistic research is mainly connected to the environment of art higher education, and I also wrote my dissertation about it, I have to say that when one works in this way for a long time, it gradually becomes part of one's method. That is, I still use the tools that I used in artistic research when doing research-based projects. One of the main outputs I have now, after a year of working in social services, is a new project that should lower the threshold of cultural institutions in my view. I've been exploring the concept of post-art for the last few years. I don't separate it from creating too much. It was also important for this project to collect more systematically a certain type of data and evidence. I need to substantiate and communicate the need for the project, and that's where these methods help me. The things I've learned in artistic research are often generally based on some methods that have been modified from the field of scientific research, whether it's sociological methods or a basic anthropological field diary. It's a kind of systematization of work that is greater than that of standard artwork. In the broadest sense, research is actually systematic work that brings new knowledge, new insights. And that's what I keep doing even now. In any case, I see great potential in the area of making culture accessible to low-income people.

As I know it from the arts environment, there are too many obstacles in the accessibility of cultural services. There's mostly just a declarative effort to be there for everyone, so to speak, but institutions do terribly little, and of course it's not enough at all. For example, the National Gallery has announced free entry one day a month. For a certain group of the population this is certainly an incentive, but it's not an excluded group, they are people who can orient themselves. They are not people who have some invisible barrier that would exclude them from that space. Whereas the very people that I'm concerned about, even if they learned about it, because of those less visible things, they wouldn't go there anyway, because they're really on the margin, they've got a lot of wounds in them. They usually have the experience of being kicked out of those spaces or finding them inaccessible. Moreover, it is often associated with a poor psychological state; such people, like people in depression, are unable to get out of bed and go anywhere. Thus, there is always a need for a mediator, someone to be a guide. And only then can the declarations that the institutions offer something like this or have it in their programme come true. 

So it's about lowering the threshold of cultural institutions, and that can only be done if there is coordination among social services, among social services users, among people who are willing to be guides, and among cultural institutions that give incentives. That means that this project will basically be a fairly elaborate website and app where people willing to take someone from social institutions to a cultural event can sign up. These people need to be trained, because social services users are very vulnerable people, so you need to know a little bit about who's on the app. After some training, it will then be possible to mark one, two, or three dates per month, per six months, in the calendar, when these people can go, and they will also indicate what their radius of action is. I would like it to work not only in Prague, but to be able to expand afterwards, or to be nationwide. We also need to communicate with cultural institutions and get acquisitions of entries. I already had a practical experience with the National Theatre, when the drama department of the National Theatre was willing to give us a limited number of tickets. With gallery institutions it is easier in some ways, but if you are dealing with larger institutions, you need to know what their capacity is. The third part is communication with social workers. They can identify users who are capable of going there and have at least some type of interest. They're not in a situation where they'd enthusiastically call for a cultural experience, and you need to find out how much good it could do them. In a shelter, we can meet people who are university graduates, and there are a number of people who come from the cultural sector, which doesn't quite fit the stereotype of people who have never been to a theatre or a gallery. 

First, all three components need to be coordinated. I would like to set this up as automatically as possible in the sense that it is important to design the website well and program it in such a way as to reduce administration, and when something is created, to coordinate it with one or two people. So that's what I'd like to do for a while as my main job.

I am now writing with Bernadeta Babáková, with whom I also collaborated on the book Sediments of Wellness Diagnosis. We're writing a text about Maria Sedláčková, who was a resistance fighter who worked with biological weapons. It will be presented in the Rubín cultural centre. She worked for a veterinary institute and brought out various diseases, pathogenic even for humans. She actively used them in the anti-fascist resistance and died very young, at the age of 22. We've studied the existing material on the subject, but we're also going to the sites. It's not really an academic text, it's a free artistic text. And then I'm writing an experimental text that relates to messianic movements in Judaism. There are also little observations associated with that. I have a part of my family from Montenegro where Shabtai Tzvi died and where he has his grave, who was one of the false messiahs who was very much concerned some kind of transgression, in this case, of religious frameworks and commands. 

Actually, I'm using exactly the same means as I used when my research was directed more towards galleries. After all, I'm working a lot with images here too, like photography, and it's just that it's probably going to be more in book form. There is artistic research in the context of visual art that can result in a text without an image. It's not really that different from how I've worked before. 

I think art has more than one function. An artist can be part of a larger collective and work on something that has overlap beyond the art itself. For example, now I have participated in the preparation of some exhibitions of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences. And with Czech Radio I'm doing a project for the 100th anniversary of Czech Radio. And there it's important to become a full member of an interdisciplinary team that deals with such a thing. Immersing yourself in the topic through research is a necessary part of it and leads to completely different outcomes than if you are just an exhibition designer. Bruno Latour also writes about why interdisciplinary teams should accept artists. It's because there are different approaches to the method in art, and it is the confrontation of methods and a different sensibility that can bring something fundamental to a project, even for scientists. So that's, say, one answer to why research is important. And then in an age that is very elliptical and works a lot with the image, with some kind of information, but very flattened, very fast and in instant form, the role of the artist is to offer some kind of alternative. Images and attractive images can already be made by artificial intelligence, so we have to offer something more, a more sophisticated immersion that artificial intelligence is not capable of in principle. So I think that even more than before, the field of more systematic, sophisticated work that uses resources in depth and quality is opening up. 

Yes, and when people who are in science also realize that there are artists who are willing to go beyond design or visuality and go along intensively with them, it leads to results that are interesting to them, and then the incentives come from outside of art colleges per se. And maybe that's something that's important to me. It's an area that also stands out from the institutional framework of the visual arts, which is actually an advantage now for the first time. I'm exploring that in-between space more intensely now than before, because to a certain extent there's nothing else left for me. 

I think there's this basic division even among artists: those who work with some kind of documentary methods and observe the world around them and somehow sort and transform it. They're looking at something and then they transform that observation and bring it closer, either to a cultural audience or to some other audience. And then there are those who are more inward, which I don't mean that they're more egotistical, not necessarily. They just have that dilution inside and they do more self-observation, and then they translate that into their works. Both ways are definitely valuable, but they're different types of work. The ego of the artistic researcher is obviously very much there too, but there's mainly a curiosity to explore the world around you.