Animal Rights in Comics

A lecture with Martin Tománek and workshop for children with Toy_Box.

How do animals and their rights appear in comics? Do animals do better in comic book reality than in the real world of large-scale farming and unequal relationships? And how can comics be an effective tool for telling stories about our relationship to more than the human world?

Come to Martin Tománek’s lecture on animal rights in comics and to a workshop for children with Toy_box, which will focus on how to tell other stories of interspecies relationships through comics.

Both the lecture and workshop will be held in Czech language. Free of entry.

• Workshop for Children with Toy_Box (3.30–5.30 pm)
  • suitable for children 10+
  • please register via: insitututuzkosti@gmail.com

Can comics and art help animals? And how exactly? Asks the artist and comic book author Toy_Box, who has extensive experience with such work – she is the author of a series of vegan paintings, comics on animal rights, collaborated with shelters and a rescue organization that helped nature there in Australia after a wave of fires. She also collaborated with Czech conservationists and rescued and adopted several dogs from the shelter. In the first part of the workshop, Toy_Box will talk about his activism and creation, in the second part you will have the opportunity to create comics with her.

Illustrator, comic book author and painter Toy_Box lives with her family in Prague. She and her partner are raising 4 children, two of them in alternating care on a week-by-week basis. She graduated in scenography at the Faculty of Drama of the Academy of Performing Arts and also in the field of interactive media, media communication at the Josef Škvorecký Literary Academy. In her free time, she likes to walk her dogs in a park, practice Thai-box and even though she is not working, she still likes to draw.

• A lecture by Martin Tománek (from 4.30 pm)

The comic book genre has always been a marginal medium, but the more it was a side of high art, the freer it was internally. Within the comic book medium, there are many approaches and ways to tell the relationship between humans and animals. Martin Tománek will present selected comics that deal with animal rights, as well as some startling examples that are controversial or confirm the status quo.

Before studying social pedagogy, Martin Tománek worked at a slaughterhouse, from where he drew inspiration for this comic. He is currently working on critical pedagogy in the Futuropolis project, and is also a founding member of the Sdruženy and Empty Thrones groups. He works as a publicist on the pages of the cultural magazine Lógr, and has also published a text on environmental comics for Kapitál. He regularly lectures and conducts workshops at vegan events. He is a co-worker in the Three Tails team, where he worked as a vegan chef.

This event is part of the project series Living Outside Their Names in the dramaturgy of Eva Koťátková (Institute of Anxiety), a series of public events, workshops, discussions, performances, etc., which aim to bring children closer to the world of animals, plants, mushrooms and other nonhuman inhabitants of our world, to think together about more meaningful and sensitive possibilities of our coexistence.

Supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Hall and State Fund of Culture.