Roughly 150 musicians took part in a public concert at Prague’s Main Railway Station on Sunday evening to raise awareness about the underfunding of culture in Czechia. The campaign, titled Let’s Not Let Culture Go Silent, is backed by two dozen important cultural institutions, among them the Czech Philharmonic, the Prague Symphony Orchestra FOK, and the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra. To find out what they are striving for, I spoke with Jan Nykrýn, a member of the Czech Union of Musicians, and started by asking him why they chose a concert as a form of protest:
“The concert was organized because it is important to bring attention of the public to the cultural situation in the Czech Republic. There are three main reasons why we organized this protest. The first reason is that the Ministry of Culture is trying to reduce the amount of money that is supposed to go to the cultural sphere. The second reason is the salaries in the cultural industry, and the third is the concept of a public cultural institution, which is supposed to be a new subject of Czech law, and it is very hazardous to the institutions that should become part of this. So these are the main reasons.”
See the rest here.
Author: Amelia Mola-Schmidt