The central slaughterhouse in Holešovice used to be, for a time, almost a city of its own—or a ghetto: hidden behind high walls, it covered 10 hectares and contained 49 halls, a network of streets with squares, a power plant, a bank, underground passageways, and rail lines leading to the nearby Bubny train station. A century ago, butchers here slaughtered and butchered up to 87 million head of cattle, pigs, and horses annually.

An audio walk through the slaughterhouse grounds evokes a time when the cries and wails of transported and slaughtered animals echoed far and wide, and from the sewers came the faint squeaks of hundreds of thousands of rats, living in the underground passages of this extermination camp in Prague 7.

Miloš Vojtěchovský (*1955) is a curator and educator. He studied aesthetics and art history at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and, since the mid-1970s, has been involved in experimental music and the visual arts. He has collaborated on projects such as Imaginary Museum Projects in Amsterdam (Orbis Pictus Revisited – ZKM 1992–1997) and “Morning of the Magicians” at the National Gallery in Prague; he taught at the Department of Art Theory and History at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, and at the Center for Audiovisual Studies at FAMU. Curator of the Školská 28 Gallery and founder of the audio portal sonicity.cz, or the symposia organized by the Hermit Foundation and the Center for Metamedia Plasy, projects such as vs. Interpretation, On the Edge of Solitude, etc.

Venue: Holešovice Market