In the past, and still today, Jablonec beads have traveled across oceans to serve as magical artifacts, social putty and symbolic capital in the hands of indigenous tribes, often more valuable than economic wealth itself. Ornaments have always affirmed a person's status in a group and became part of a ritualized exchange of gifts. With this exhibition I would like to point out the acupuncture point of this phenomenon of symbolic capital, and that is the jewellery from Jablonec. Here, on the southern slope of the Jizera Mountains, this material has also become a visible cultural expression of the local community, a sap concentrating the essence of the whole society for local glassmakers, pimps, factories, merchants and stringers. The exhibition Jizard Totems engages jewellery in its overarching symbol - it is not just an ornament, but a fetish, a sign that defines us, while communicating nonverbally with us in the same way as the surrounding nature from which this material was born.

In today's world, we often see the Earth as only a source of raw materials, not the source of all life. This technocratic approach distances us from seeing the landscape as a living organism. This exhibition project therefore uses the ancient method of geomancy - not in the sense of simple divination, but as an effort to rediscover the energetic lines between humans, production and place. We must begin to ask what is the role of technology and industry that has shaped this region. If we see technology as a by-product of our culture, we will understand that, just as the automobile unintentionally created the modern city and its problems, the glassmaking tradition has shaped the soul and face of Jablonec in ways that we are only now discovering in retrospect.

We are therefore asking ourselves, as a generation and as a civilization, a crucial self-reflective question: Given our relationship to technology and landscape, what kind of ancestors are we already becoming? Are we just consumers, or can we create a sustainable web of life? The photographs and objects in this installation are not just aesthetics, they are an attempt to return to the ability to enter the present through observation. Through the photographs, I seek a way out of modern culture that measures success only by growth, and return to the grounding and indigenous wisdom that is hidden deep beneath the layers of this region's industrial history.

R. A. Chocholoušová (*1979) is an artist from Jablonec who focuses on photography, video art, painting, objects and their mutual overlaps. Currently Radka is finishing her PhD studies at the Faculty of Art and Architecture at TUL in Liberec. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno in the Environment studio (Vladimír Merta), she completed her bachelor studies at the Faculty of Applied Art and Design in Ústí n. L. in the Natural Materials studio (Jaroslav Prášil). She works as a glass and goldsmith technologist and teacher of drawing at the Secondary Vocational School of Crafts and Services in Jablonec n. N. and has long been involved in rites of passage associated with non-invasive tattooing - ritual body decoration.

 Accompanying publication – a leporello available at www.divutvor.cz.