![\"Milde,](\"https:\/\/english.radio.cz\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/rcz_lightbox_v2\/public\/images\/4eb57b58cb1407e6e7b18d6be6455131.jpg?itok=U4-jSULh×tamp=1767201017\" "\\"Milde,")
<\/a><\/p>\n
Milde, Looking for a Home, catalogue front page|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n
Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cWell, our journey actually started earlier than that, because before we came to New York we had already spent seven years in Germany and Switzerland. But we always felt like we really needed this American experience. We visited several times and we fell in love with the city \u2014 and also with the nature here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Marek:\u00a0\u201cOur first out-of-home experience was in Switzerland, where we had a happy life. We spent almost seven years in Switzerland and Germany. And this German environment is a very organized culture \u2014 everything works, everything is functional and beautiful.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, at some point it may also feel a little stale, a little slow, and limited. And of course, in your early twenties, you want to see what the world really is.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn our visits to New York we always felt the energy \u2014 very excited by the bounty of cultures and by what was happening in the cultural sphere. It was incredible. We were artists before, but each with a separate practice. Living in New York somehow brought our partnership into a creative one. Since 2011, we\u2019ve worked together as a duo. We develop our projects together, and that brought a big change into the way we see and do art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Can you touch on how New York has shaped you as artists?<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Milde, A la Cart, DUMBO, Brooklyn 2014|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cAs we mentioned, New York is such a diverse place with a lot of energy. But we were also strangers in a new land. What felt important for us was looking for roots and connections \u2014 not only at home, but also back to nature. That\u2019s how we grew up. We both spent a lot of time outdoors with our families, and we keep doing that with our son Adam.<\/p>\n \u201cWe keep looking for ways to connect these places that look very divided, but in a sense are deeply connected \u2014 and can\u2019t exist without each other.<\/p>\n \u201cMany of our projects use objects that are man-made. For example, in our recent show at Kunsthalle Praha in 2025, we had a real New York yellow taxicab that we planted with a Czech-American forest. We love incorporating nature and the man-made together to create a collision of ideas that spark new perceptions.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde: Vol\u00e1n\u00ed lesa (The Call of the Forest)|Photo: Vojt\u011bch Ve\u0161krna, Kunsthalle Praha<\/p>\n How would you say you integrate your Czech identity into the new New York identity you\u2019ve created for yourselves?<\/p>\n Marek: \u201cYou can never deny where you come from. Even after decades here, we\u2019ll always be Czechs. And Brooklyn lets you do that \u2014 you can be yourself. We\u2019re both from Prague, so we maintain our Czech bubble at home. But we\u2019re surrounded by hundreds of other bubbles; so many nations live here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde, Homescape, 2014|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n \u201cI never thought national origin \u2014 specifically being Czech \u2014 would be a theme in my work. But identity became important. Once you stop being a tourist here, you may feel a little displaced. I was surprised to feel homesick after seven years abroad prior to living in Brooklyn. I never expected homesickness to happen in New York, but it did.<\/p>\n \u201cI realized I needed not only a connection to the city or community, but a wider context. For me, finding roots here in the New World was through nature. When I discovered the beautiful countryside \u2014 very strong nature, much stronger than in Europe \u2014 I started to feel at home.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd finding plants I grew up with was comforting. Some plants were brought from Europe during the colonial era and became naturalized here. Encountering them created a feeling of home.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde, Cabinet of Smells, 2015|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cYarrow, thyme, and St John\u2019s wort are all plants that were brought here.\u201d<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cWe created a project called Plantarium \u2014 a garden made from large Corten Steel pipes planted with European herbs and weeds that now grow all across America. They can be considered invasive, but they are fully naturalized. And interestingly, Native Americans didn\u2019t see them negatively; they immediately used them medicinally.<\/p>\n \u201cThese gardens frame nature and offer perspective. We\u2019ve created several such installations.\u201d<\/p>\n Can you give us an example of a few other projects you\u2019ve done in New York?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cWe had a project at the Westport Art Center called\u00a0Lost and Found Gardens of Manhattan. Over the years, we gathered household plants \u2014 many tropical \u2014 and created a garden framed by a flying carpet. We planted them inside the carpet, reframing the home as a tropical forest. We also pointed out how houseplants originate in rainforests where some are almost extinct \u2014 yet they thrive in our homes.\u201d<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cAnother project was in a public space in Brooklyn, near the Brooklyn Bridge, called\u00a0A La Carte.\u00a0It was a community project where we invited local residents who were interested in gardening but had no experience or opportunity.<\/p>\n \u201cThis installation was a structure out of supermarket shopping carts filled with soil, where people could grow plants for their favorite dishes. We did this for a season and we thought it would fail because the area was so crowded and busy, but people kept coming and the plants thrived. In the end, we had a nice dinner together.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cAnd also part of this project was a display at Smack Mellon Gallery \u2014 a farm-to-table installation. We had a blackboard with menus, but instead of prices we listed the number of days it would take to grow each dish. The longest was ratatouille \u2014 eggplant takes around 180 days to grow.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u00c3 La Cart|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cCertain dishes took 60 days. The project served to recall people’s sense of what it takes to bring something to the table and the time it takes. And it was great that we didn\u2019t have any vandalism.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cThe only thing was a restaurant guy who was also part of this project kept taking mint from the cart for mojitos.\u201d<\/p>\n What is it like to work together? How do you balance your individual voices versus the shared vision, and does that ever clash?<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cI think what\u2019s an advantage of working together is that both of us have different skills. Marek is really great at building \u2014 he has great visions and ideas. I\u2019m more the day-to-day person pulling things through. When one of us has an idea, we bounce it off the other. If it passes our critical discussion, the project already has a certain quality.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are clashes, but we are both passionate about what we do, and that always helps us come to a conclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cSometimes in the arts, as a creator, you don\u2019t have a problem with what to do, but with what not to do. That dialogue we have together is helpful. As individuals with egos, you have to step back sometimes. We didn\u2019t always work together, but even before collaborating officially, we constantly helped each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cOnce we started working together, we were able to focus more on large-scale installations. One installation in 2011 was\u00a0The Living Room\u00a0at the Queens Library, created entirely from found objects. The idea came from how we furnished our first student apartment. New York is so dynamic \u2014 people move constantly, and they throw things out that you wouldn\u2019t, for example, find in Prague.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Smack Mellon Gallery|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cVery nice furniture \u2014 high quality \u2014 in the garbage. You can basically furnish an entire apartment this way. It made us question consumerism: how things are produced and immediately discarded.<\/p>\n \u201cObjects used to have history and were passed through generations. Now consumer goods disappear quickly. So we started to see narratives in common objects.<\/p>\n The installation was functional \u2014 visitors used it as a lounge \u2014 and then realized it was an art installation about the cycle of things.\u201d<\/p>\n What is the process from start to finish?<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cOne of the main things in our practice is collecting resources \u2014 ideas, objects, and materials related to a theme we\u2019re interested in. In the initial phase, we usually don\u2019t know where it will go.<\/p>\n \u201cIn New York, you find books left neatly on doorsteps with \u2018free\u2019 signs. We collected these books for years. They often came as small collections, and we started thinking of them as portraits of the person who discarded them. We kept each set in the exact order we found it.<\/p>\n \u201cWe built a bookcase sculpture with a library identification system and invented fictional names for each collection.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Milde, A la Cart, 2014, Smack Mellon, Galelry, DUMBO|Photo: \u00a9 Krist\u00fdna and Marek Milde<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cThere was \u2018Astronomer from the Upper East Side,\u2019 \u2018Fantasy Junkie from Bushwick,\u2019 Bibles,\u00a0Atlas Shrugged\u00a0\u2014 you name it. It was fascinating to see what the city contains and what stories appear through these small gestures of throwing books away.\u201d<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s the city \u2014 a portrait of the people. It\u2019s not about the big buildings here; it\u2019s about the people.\u201d<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cDefinitely. Foraging in the city and foraging in nature \u2014 these are the two activities that spark the beginnings of the discussion, and we see where it will lead us.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother project we just finished for Kunsthalle Praha was inspired by riding the subway in New York. We saw all these tree tattoos people had and started to think about how they bring nature with them in the city \u2014 kind of like mobile gardens \u2014 and how it would look if you put them all together living in the city.<\/p>\n \u201cSo we did an open call where people sent us pictures of their trees, and we created an animation of a forest. You could connect the people, the social structure, with the ecosystem of the forest. For us, they are very similar \u2014 they connect together to create something much greater.\u201d<\/p>\n How did it feel bringing that exhibition,\u00a0Call of the Forest, back to Prague \u2014 back to your homeland?<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cThe Kunsthalle is in the middle of the places where we grew up. I grew up in Mal\u00e1 Strana and Marek in Prague 7 and Letn\u00e1, and this is right in the middle. It was emotional \u2014 just dropping off Adam at my mother\u2019s and going to work at Kunsthalle.<\/p>\n \u201cThe whole team was incredible; they gave us great support. The response was very positive. For me, it was rewarding to find out that some people went to see the show three times. That was very moving.\u201d<\/p>\n Do you observe a difference in the way your art is received with Czech audiences versus audiences here in America?<\/p>\n Kristyna:\u00a0\u201cI think it was interesting for the Czech audience to see the American New World through Czech eyes. That\u2019s maybe a kind of translation.\u201d<\/p>\n Marek:\u00a0\u201cDefinitely. In Prague, people were curious to see what comes from America, or what Czech expats do, and what our perspective is.<\/p>\n