The May
Queens

THE MAY QUEENS is a live artistic event situated at the intersection of happening, ritual, documentary film, and spatial installation. The project was created in collaboration with the Prague City Gallery as part of the Art for the City program. The artist chose the Kačerov metro station as the site of the action, specifically focusing on its neglected central feature – Poupě (Bud), a fountain by Jiří Kryštůfek. This fountain became the symbolic heart of the project, which was inspired by the folk tradition of “opening the springs” – a springtime ritual of renewal – reimagined by Jakub Jahn and curator Kristýna Hájková as a call for both physical and symbolic cleansing within the contemporary urban context.

The three-day sequence of the project intertwined sensitive work with public space, community engagement, and precise visual dramaturgy. On the first day, sixteen young performers cleaned the fountain, both pragmatically and symbolically transforming the neglected site into a renewed civic space. On the second day, dressed in contemporary white garments evoking traditional festive costumes, the girls tied small bouquets in the station lobby and distributed them to passing commuters. The third and final day culminated in a ritual procession through the metro, accompanied by live music composed for the occasion by Amelie Siba, and concluded with a collective invocation at the fountain. Collaboration with Cimburkova Elementary School, which serves children with special educational needs, added a quiet but powerful social dimension to the entire work.

THE MAY QUEENS operates as a relational structure in which different temporal layers intersect – the past of folk tradition, the presence of a specific urban site, and an imagined future toward which the project gestures with both urgency and hope. The artistic vision is shaped by trust in interdisciplinary collaboration, openness to working with non-professional performers, and a careful balance between aesthetics and ethics. The piece exists at the threshold of documentary and fiction, art and care, performance and urban intervention – a testament to the possibility of creating liminal spaces even within the chaos of the contemporary city, where vulnerability becomes strength and artistic gesture becomes a way of seeing the world anew.