A Review Essay on the Exhibition Bydlet Ústí: Dostupné reality [Housing in Ústí: Accessible Realty], 7.3 – 28.6, Galerie Hraničář, Ústí nad Labem
Exhibitors: Kateřina Bílá, Marie Čtveráčková and Martin Hůla, Kolektiv OPĚT:, Vanda Michalská and Šimon Sýkora, Martin Netočný and Medard Zeman, Jonáš Richter and Sláva Sobotovičová, Lukáš Šmejkal, Erika Velická
Curators: Elen Kužvartová, Jana Pavlová, Boleslav Šmejkal
Discussions of housing crisis, unaffordability, displacement, spatial (in)justice and similar issues regularly focus on the places where such issues are not only the harshest but also the most immediately visible to the persons and institutions who produce such discourse: capital cities and other large metropolitan areas. Much less often are the same questions posed to provincial or marginalized settlements, deindustrialized rustbelts, scattered conurbations shaped by past extractivism – in short, places marked by spatial shrinkage and demographic outflow. Fewer people, or so the marketist logic suggests, implies less competition over scarce living space, not to mention reduced attraction for well-heeled gentrifiers or profit-minded investors; in short, the urgent issues occur where the people go, not from where they leave.
Of course, this narrow focus invariably proves inadequate. Housing financialization and speculative buying reaches its ever-grasping tentacles outward to shrinking settlements as much as growing ones; meanwhile, narratives of population decline overlook the many residents unable to leave. Perhaps most harmfully, the view provided by the metropolitan gaze ignores a great deal of valuable knowledge from the peripheries, the margins, the forgotten – valuable precisely for its non-metropolitan, non-elite, openly system-challenging origins, not to mention the discomforting questions it asks.
One instance where the experience of marginalized urbanities has entered the awareness of the cultural public, or at least that small fragment where spatial practice and activism overlap, is a Czech exhibition held outside of Prague, highlighting a regional city that rarely crosses the horizon of wider interest. Entitled “Bydlet Ústí: Dostupné reality” [Housing in Ústí: Accessible Realty], it examines the past, present and imaginable future(s) of housing in the city of Ústí nad Labem through contemporary artworks, public interventions, and historical analysis. And in a location deeply marked by economic difficulties and no small degree of stigmatization, it finds certain unusual traces of hope and inspiration – defying the cheap stereotypes and toxic cultural hierarchies still too persistent in elite Czech discourse.
(View of Předlice, Ústí nad Labem, June 2026)
Before the exhibit, start with the place: Ústi nad Labem itself. Here, the industrial conurbation stretching from Chomutov through Most and Teplice, a ragged string of industry and open coalpits along the edge of the Ore Mountains separating Bohemia from Saxony, reaches the river Labe. Once the industrial powerhouse of the Habsburg Empire, it still displays affecting fragments of its fin-de-siecle past. Yet its German-speaking residents under Czechoslovak rule became the protagonists of the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, leading to the devastation of Kristallnacht and wartime bombing. Then, following their expulsion after 1945, the factories and mines, the industrialist villas and the workers’ tenements, were resettled with migrants from across the width of the republic, including significant numbers of Roma from Slovakia. The state-socialist order saw ruthless exploitation of the region’s lignite deposits, a pervasive haze of brown-coal smoke and wanton demolitions; the entire historic centre of Most, not too far to the southwest, was destroyed for coal mining, while many other settlements, Ústí very much not excepted, lost large chunks of their historic built fabric.
Even after the harsh convulsions of the 20th century, the past four decades of open-society capitalism have not necessarily proved more merciful. Industry was hit by privatization schemes that often flirted (or more) with outright criminality, while the social exclusion of the Roma population grew far more extreme, culminating in the infamous “Matiční wall”, separating a deliberate concentration of evicted Roma families from non-Roma residents. Though the wall itself stood for a mere six weeks in the autumn of 1999 – and indeed similar walls are hardly rare elsewhere – it remains in memory as a striking synecdoche conveying the visible spatial injustice pervading the city today.
(The quarry on Mariánská skála / Marienburg)
Directly to the north of the present city centre rises the city’s most iconic topographic feature, the massive phonolite outcropping of Mariánská skála (Marienburg in earlier times). If the quarry on the opposite side of the rock exemplifies the region’s extractivist economy, the rail line heading past it, northward toward Dresden and Berlin – lined by its tatterdemalion fringe of Habsburg-era railway suburbs interspersed with prefabricated high-rise blocks – displays the spatial-social plight of Ústí’s Roma population with painful clarity. Matiční ulice lies here, with the last of its buildings still standing as a hollow wreck, and so does the outermost housing estate of Mojžíř, which by most indicators has replaced Matiční as the current end-destination for impoverished Roma families. Or, for that matter, the custom-made concrete barrier that was the “Matiční wall”, repurposed as the outer fence of the city zoo. And it is not only Ústí’s Roma population at stake: while the hemmed-in ghettos stand out as significantly more decrepit, the white working-class tower blocks from the 1970s and 1980s – for all their better upkeep – relate a tale less of blatant exclusion than of quiet desperation: the privatism of the vast housing sell-off of the 1990s, with the concrete-walled unit now often representing a household’s sole asset.
This historical detour is necessary not only for understanding the background of the exhibition, but equally its location: Galerie Hraničář. Constructed in the 1920s as the meeting hall of the German Socialist Party of the city, its own path reflects the shifts of the city’s history: a cinema in the early 1960s (gaining its still-used name of the “border guardian”), closure after 2010, revival since 2014 as an independent cultural and social centre through the involvement of the town’s theatre company and students from the local Purkyně University. For all the aspersions cast upon the lack of memory or roots as contributing factors to social decline in Czechia’s “post-German” regions, no less valid is the long legacy of – citing sociologist Soňa Szomolányi – islands of positive deviation within the less cohesive social fabric, from the hippie communes in abandoned German farmhouses of the 1970s up through projects like Hraničář or Teplice’s Zahálka. And the way that the building itself evokes two equally vanished pasts –the Bohemian-German ethnicity and the hopes of democratic socialism – brings it into the exhibition as itself a participant.
Inside, “Bydlet Ústí” spreads across three levels in the upper gallery spaces, the steep staircases between each floor almost evoking in miniature the topography of the Ore Mountains outside. One unavoidable visual motif is the use of lace curtains throughout the displays, pale spectres suggesting a lost domesticity, perhaps as well the ghostly material remnants of the region’s German hauntology. Indeed, the first object visible when ascending the first staircase is in fact the work by Medard Zeman and Martin Netočný, entitled “Séance”, the curtain-shrouded table and chairs evoking memories of the deceased, whether individuals or concepts: interwar Ústí’s socialist mayor Leopold Pölzl, architect Franz Josef Arnold, or (in the curators’ own words) “the spirit of a deceased era when accessible and dignified housing was regarded as a highly political matter, a goal worth striving for.” The built legacy of the German socialists in historical Aussig between 1919 and 1938 has been – not surprisingly – largely ignored by Czech architectural history; as we shall see, it survives only in fragmentary form. Hence the recollection of an active municipality taking steps to house its less prosperous citizens, if one so distant from current Czech public discourse as to form a phantom itself, is all the more valuable when brought back into the present.
Zeman and Netočný’s work forms the first of four thematic sections of the exhibition, under the designation “The City as the Builder of Housing”. (Somewhat outside of these categories are the paintings by Lukáš Šmejkal throughout the exhibition space.) The second section, situated in the nook behind the spectral séance-table, is entitled “Exploitation from Housing Provision”. Against the aspirations of municipal housing open to all potential residents, it depicts several cases through the city’s history of housing deployed as a technology of power. First, above a desk of evidently prewar vintage to suggest a corporate office of an earlier age, are the plans for company housing prepared for the Schicht soap works. Between 1919 and 1938, the company constructed both row houses and apartment blocks for its manual (Siedlung I and III) and clerical (Siedlung II) employees, combining social conscience and managerial paternalism in equal parts – the significant improvement in living standards balanced by strict rules for company tenants. Yet the housing-as-discipline paradigm, once more, pales in comparison to the current forms of exploitation.
One is the Czech form of the poverty-industrial complex: slumlords charging primarily Roma families, facing no other options beyond homelessness, ridiculously high sums paid from state housing supplements for the worst imaginable accommodations. The successful recent documentary released under the English title The Impossibility depicts the situation in one such building in Brno. Ústí’s equivalent is the outer suburb of Předlice, depicted here through a map of its terrain and artist Kateřina Bílá’s satirical real-estate ads for unliveable spaces (garages, cellars, etc.) at exorbitant cost. Předlice, once a quite pleasant fin-de-siecle residential district, now appears almost necrotic in its decrepitude – a necrotecture visually far removed from Rowland Atkinson’s corporate-oligarchic dead spaces, yet as much a product of the same economic order. Cast headlong into the privatization of the 1990s, it came first into the hands of several Roma entrepreneurs from Moravia, intent on wringing what profits they could from the Ústí Roma families relocated from city-centre locations. Yet in turn, the Roma profiteers were themselves largely dispossessed by the far stronger capital of white investors, looking to play a long game with vulnerable lives.
Recent statements from local politicians (unfortunately only detailed in the brochure that serves as the exhibit’s catalogue) suggest an interest in restoring the historic eclectic-Secessionist buildings for “acceptable tenants”, understood as the common Czech weasel-words for “non-Roma”. At the same time, a local entrepreneur, Boris Rudý – a contributor to the data for the map – has begun renovating Předlice buildings for rental to Roma families at relatively fair costs; residents have created the civic organization AMARE Předlice for various self-help and advocacy projects. For now, the question of Předlice’s future remains open, if not necessarily optimistic in any of its likely trajectories.
(Another view of Předlice, June 2026)
And optimism hardly seems an appropriate expectation, looking down to the press-cuttings on the desktop in the third item in “Exploitation”. These newspaper articles record the privatization in 2004 of two highly desirable apartment blocks, from the same era as Předlice, directly in the city centre. While the municipality promised the tenants the right to purchase their flats directly at advantageous sums, it sold the buildings in entirety to the real-estate company Spobyt, who then arranged the sales to the tenants at twice the promised price. Itself dating from the era of socialist employer-provided housing (the company was originally the real-estate arm of the chemical enterprise Spolchemie), Spobyt is now part of the Czech conglomerate CPI Property Group, which holds among its properties the luxurious Palais Maeterlinck in Nice – yet also held a significant stake in Předlice at one point. As if the path between aristocratic residence and atrocious slum were not merely a novelistic contrivance: the twists and turns of post-1989 capitalism have a way of making a Dickens novel seem obvious and believable.
Heading to the stairs, the third section – “Collectivity” – starts in a side chamber hung with still more curtain-ghosts, where a video screen displays scenes of a different necrotectural monument. In this case, foreshadowing the subject matter to follow, it is the skeletonized wreckage of Hotel Máj, once a quite luxurious hotel following the conventions of that unusual architectural typology of state socialism. Sláva Sobotovičová and Jonáš Richter accompanied the scenes of the stripped-bare ferroconcrete hulk in soft snow with recitations of German-language socialist texts interspersed with the testimonies of the homeless squatters in the ruin. A Panel Story stripped bare of its panels, it is the refuge of last resort for its residents, less unhoused than literally de-housed in this literally yet lethally “deconstructivist” architecture.
And hotels form the motif on the next floor, accentuating another hidden link in the Czechoslovak past, from the collective residence of the interwar avant-garde through the residential hotels of the 1960s up to current refugee or flophouse accommodations. A more fortunate luxury hotel of the 1980s, Ústí’s Hotel Vladimír – named, in the practice of the decade, after the sister city in the USSR – found its own form of redemption from 2022 to 2025 through offering emergency housing to Ukrainian refugees, hence its unofficial renaming as the Hotel Volodymyr.
A contrasting situation across many dimensions (spatial, social, historical) is recalled by the commemoration of a different type of collective action: the occupation of the former workers’ hostel in Čelakovského ulice in the suburb of Krásné Březno in early 2013. In another grim plot twist to the housing-precarity tale, it then offered shelter, despite the mould and bedbugs, for Roma families relodged in the school gym in Předlice after being evacuated from a block in danger of collapse. Not surprisingly, CPI was again the owner of the new property, and insisted, soon after the families’ arrival, on their being sent further along their journey of racist dispossession. One small victory came when residents and sympathizers defied CPI and its billionaire owner Radovan Vítek to remain until they could find a suitable place to live. Artist Erika Velická created the memorial “Owl and Friends”, containing among other objects the face mask worn during the demonstrations by the Czech artist toy_box.
And then to the uppermost floor. Here, section C continues its collectives, but now, moving away from late-socialist luxury, we have the “hotel residence” (Hotelový dům) from Ústí’s Severní Terasa housing estate, exemplifying the post-Stalinist return to certain prewar imaginings of a collective residence with partially shared household functions. Marie Čtveráčková and Martin Hůla prepared a sound installation of the Severní Terasa residence today, heard through (somewhat anachronistic) telephones atop an elegant prewar dining table in a small room to the side. Curiously, CPI makes yet another appearance as the current owner of the Hotelový dům, though at least in this one instance operating it not as quasi-internment for Roma families but as relatively cheap market-leased housing. Worse has surely happened….
Directly in front of the staircase, however, is the indication of the show’s final section, “Identity, Home”. An oil painting by Šimon Sýkora recalls the vanished village of Tuchomyšl (Schönfeld), one of several outlying settlements scraped from the earth’s surface for brown-coal strip mining in the 1970s and 1980s. Vanda Michalská’s video presents the site of the village now, where the former Chabařovice mine underwent recultivation into the artificial lake of Milada. It is worth recalling that the ravages of coal did not end in 1989: Libkovice near Most was obliterated in 1993 and Horní Jiřetín near Litvínov remained in the line of fire well into the current millennium. Yet much credit its due to the recultivation and rewilding work of the past several decades, with a new extra-human layer (as Michalská makes strongly clear) complementing rather than obscuring these lieux de memoire.
Finally, we leave the realm of the purely visual to bring into play the olfactory – the unwelcome vegetative stink of composting emerging from the final attic chamber. The minimalist installation by Kolektiv OPĚT places a plastic composter at the centre of the confined space, turning the grass cuttings and other plant debris from the notorious Matiční ulice demolition site. Working with the Czech NGO People in Need, the compost will be used for possible gardens and an already extant football pitch where the houses once stood. Yet here, inside the attic of Hraničář, it also provides a metaphor for the situation that led to the international scandal of 1999, of confinement and stagnation, of barriers visible and invisible, of the far greater unpleasantness caused when the forces of state power deliberately ignore problems they should address. Some might find the associations a bit too clever by half, others perhaps even insulting. Still, the attempt at healing the damage – not simply the outcome of racism but even more the vengeful “sink-or-swim” mentality of the marketist 1990s – is rare enough to be welcomed at least as a positive first step.
Perhaps it is at this point the exhibition returns to its start. The apartment blocks of Matiční ulice, including the ruin still standing, were built in 1936 under Mayor Pölzl and designed by Franz Josef Arnold; their floor plan is even displayed downstairs. And in their presence or non-presence, they evoke multiple layers of deprivation and loss, of ideas and hopes, of homes however imperfect, of diverging cultures and languages flattened into the provincial gangster-capitalism of the 1990s and the bleak indifference of more recent decades. Grit and pain, though, need not imply pessimism, the cheap pleasures of aesthetic ruin-bibbing or self-satisfied apocalypticism. Often, even the reverse: less the wreckage of the model social housing than the hopefulness of football nets in the foreground, the tree-ecologies of the building roof behind. Opportunities – as Bydlet Ústí directly tells us – are still there to be seized from the jaws of rapacious capital and neglectful public administration.
Obviously, there are points in Bydlet Ústí that could provoke critique. For all the impressive thermal-insulation properties of the Hraničář building, not to mention the current questioning of architectural comfort, the arrangement of the exhibit across three flights of stairs could be challenging for some visitors. The complexities of exhibiting architecture, for those who do not immediately thrill to floor plans or axonometries, invariably pose a trap for communicating valuable social history to the lay public and the miniature scale of the authentic construction documentation certainly does not help in this regard. Moreover, the disparate, heterogeneous, almost de-structured arrangement of the individual objects and installations runs a definite risk of incompleteness, misunderstanding, even falling short in launching a much-needed critical explication of the situation in the city itself – a situation blatantly obvious immediately upon walking outside the gallery.
Yet even with these objections, Bydlet Ústí succeeded in what it evidently set out to do: to present the deliberately forgotten history, perhaps even counter-history, of the lost social-democratic Aussig without the overblown sentimentalism of the immediate post-1989 era and – far more significantly – to suggest, freely and sketchily but far from any coercion or directiveness, the possible contours of a living future amid the overlayerings of past and present. A home among the hauntings, a rooting within rootlessness itself – much like the improvised goalposts of Matiční ulice. Or even other future ad hoc homings and spatialities we still cannot yet imagine.
Martin Tharp
14.07.2026
concrete eye 
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