Substance Is What Matters

Interview for Deník on light parks, November 2024.

Where can people visit your light parks this year?

The most significant one is probably in Prague, at Žluté lázně (the Yellow Baths). We also consider the exhibitions in Brno at Špilberk and in Ostrava very important. We have smaller exhibitions, for example, at Ratměřice Chateau and in Pardubice. Another is in preparation by the pond in Příbram, and at the beginning of Advent we should open the park in Český Krumlov at the same time as the lighting of Old Town Square.

Do you also embellish places abroad?

I have only recently returned from a trip around Slovakia, where I visited Košice, Banská Bystrica and Komárno. The exhibition about Empress Sisi at Gödöllő Palace, where she spent a considerable part of her life, is very heartfelt and charming, I think. It is very close to the Hungarian capital, and the exhibition is becoming very popular. Within just a few days of opening, tours with Czech tourists had already appeared there. But to be fair, I must mention others too, such as the illuminated treetop trail at the Irish fortress of Boyard. For capacity reasons, we then had to decline the lighting of a treetop trail as far away as Canada.

Is creating light exhibitions abroad different in any way?

For years we have been decorating prestigious shopping centres, in Paris for instance, so we know the tastes of these regions and of different countries. Their requirements really are different, even in how they handle colour. The East tends to express itself in a more colourful and ornamental way. In Luxembourg or France, on the other hand, there is a kind of postmodern provocation: browns, blacks or oranges, which do not really belong to our Christmas. Another difference is that in Slovakia, for example, people value exhibitions more than we do; they know how to enjoy them and are proud of them. I felt the same in Budapest: people are delighted.

Do you not sense that delight in the Czech Republic?

Last year we received the award for the World’s Most Beautiful Christmas Destination for lighting Prague, and I think it passed almost unnoticed. I believe that anywhere else people would be aware of it, enjoy it and be proud. Moreover, I know only a few mayors who understand that an exhibition like this brings trade, tourism, interest and attractiveness to a town. Abroad, even though it is a private and commercial project, towns are keen to support it, which I cannot imagine in Bohemia.

Even so, every year your light parks make their way into more and more Czech towns.

Interest in cooperation is gradually growing. It turns out that exhibitions like these really do increase a town’s attractiveness and improve local life, which then develops far more. The mayor of Třebíč, for example, knows very well that life there flourishes even in summer. People keep visiting the town because they know it from the winter. So it is not just about two months, but about overall willingness. In general, though, I still miss in this country an effort to think long-term and conceptually, and not only within the horizon of a political term. To think about what a municipality might look like in fifty years. I am not saying that we aim to achieve that with our exhibitions, but the two are connected.

Do you come up with all the works yourself?

I usually perceive the spaces. The first business discussions are about whether to organise such an exhibition at all. When we arrived at Špilberk, for example, I imagined how beautiful life in a medieval castle could look and what we could emphasise there. I imagine it in most places, but then I hand it over to my graphic artists and designers. With some of them I even communicate rather metaphorically, in the language of art. They often bring it to life at the first attempt. Then, of course, we run into things that are not possible, for technological or production reasons, for example.

It is evident, and not only on social media, that light parks are gaining in popularity. Why is that?

It is true that we may have shown the way for other companies too. It is certainly a phenomenon of transforming public space. In the past, in my youth, it was deaf and grey. We have an enormous debt in this respect. We do not even know what public space is, or how to move and behave in it. I would very much like us to be able to fill it, not just because it is a fashionable wave at the moment, but so that we can go on cultivating it. In today’s digital age there are very few opportunities to detach ourselves from our phones and watch something together.

Was that what inspired you to create light parks?

I was originally a teacher, I love literature, and I tend to condense everything around me into shorthand. When I left school and started a business, the first thing I organised was a theatre performance. Simply put, I carry this need within me. Once, when we were holding a Christmas gathering for our business partners, friends and mayors, I created a light scenography. When the first visitors arrived, they immediately started photographing it. Everyone then said they were leaving with a fairy-tale mood, and I realised that this was it.

How are the individual light sculptures made?

Either on a robotic printer, which for now prints two-dimensional decorations that we can join into three-dimensional ones, or in the traditional way. Our craftsmen, for example, weld aluminium by hand. They cannot be ordinary welders, though. They are people who truly must have a visual sensibility. Our products are not merely industrial goods; some of them aspire to become art.

Are they all Czech products?

Yes. We are a purely Czech family company. We bought even that robotic printer ourselves, without subsidies. Nevertheless, we try to keep pace with international competitors, who are often supported by their home governments or ministries. But I am convinced that technology and form are only a means. What matters is the content.

You started as a small company in a barn, and now you have several production halls. What lies behind your success?

Perhaps luck or chance too, but fortune favours the prepared. It was not easy to go from searching for the first orders, from a single little tree, to what we do today. But new challenges are already taking shape in my head, so there is certainly great dedication behind it as well. The whole family lives for the company. For several years I did not even have a holiday. But that is not a complaint. I simply take it that way, and it is quite normal when one does something with one’s heart and wholeheartedly. We are now going through a fairly demanding period: a small company is becoming a medium-sized or large one, and suddenly we have to think far more about structures and economics.

Can you reveal the company’s turnover?

Including all branches, it is roughly two hundred and thirty million crowns a year.

Speaking of numbers, how many decorations are needed to build one light park?

At Špilberk, for example, there are roughly a hundred sculptures. And they are not small, so together they contain roughly four hundred thousand LEDs. That is a larger exhibition, comparable to the Prague one. And on the Old Town Christmas tree, for instance, there are ten kilometres of light strings. Prague suits a densely grown tree that is lit discreetly and elegantly.

How brightly does it shine at your home?

Not much. There were times when our house was the only dark one on the street. Then we gave an interview for a television channel that wanted to film it, so I had a beautifully decorated terrace. And since then it has been more or less standard, with the occasional icicle lights. More for the sake of being able to see and walk safely around the house. Personally, I like the plainest light in the windows best. I like sophisticated, simple, playful and above all maintenance-free decorations. But it must smell of pine needles. Without that, Christmas is not what it should be.