Firma: Modrý Mauricius

The FIRMA group - Michal Cimala, Jan Kaláb, Martin Krajc, Matěj Olmer, Pasta Oner, Michal Škapa, Karel Štědrý - was founded on 12 December 2019 near Prague's Stromovka in the Lokál restaurant out of the need of its members to revise romanticized ideas about the character and roles of the contemporary visual artist in order to reinvent the artist's credible and dignified starting position. The group's founding manifesto states, "In the gears of accelerating capitalism, there is little room left for the artist to humanize the social order through his work and to cultivate social dynamics by stimulating education, training and care." The prototypical starting point for artists is to be "mutual prosperity," both between artists and market-institutional mechanisms and between artists and each other. Individually established authors then replace mutual competition with collaborative models, collective decision-making and elements of corporate culture. At the same time, through the implementation of marketing thinking and entrepreneurial spirit, they aim to create a unique, rarefied artistic entity that breaks out of traditional notions of artist groups. It is in this collaborative perspective that they base the entire scenario of their Modrý Maurice.