Invitation to participate in the Central European Summer School of Imagination
Date: June 29 – July 2 Location: Kaprálův Mlýn, a unique site in the Moravian Karst
A summer school where food will tell stories, the voice will resonate through the landscape, and mushrooms and herbs will reveal the roots of identity.
We invite all those interested in taking part in a four-day program of the Central European Summer School of Imagination, and who wish to enter a shared space of learning, exchange, and experimentation. We welcome those who share an interest in transformative learning and open dialogue, and who are ready to engage with methods that connect intellect, emotions, the body, and local experience.
The summer school will offer an opportunity to reflect on how we can foster understanding in a divided society, how to open sensitive topics safely and creatively, and how to collectively develop approaches that help us navigate a changing world. We will share experiences, inspiration, and concrete methodologies.
About the Summer School
At a time when the world seems fragmented by uncertainty, bubbles, and competing voices, there is a growing need to pause, listen, and rediscover ways of being and thinking together. The summer school is an invitation into a space that makes such encounters possible. It creates a field for collectively exploring local sources of support available in Central Europe—resources that expand our capacity to engage sensitively and creatively with issues of polarization, societal crises, shifting relationships, and the possibilities of dialogue across differences.
The program combines dialogue, cooking, foraging for mushrooms and herbs, and working with place, voice, and breath.
It connects sensory work, dialogue, and a range of experiences that open space for encounters across both shared and conflicting narratives: food as a carrier of memory and Central European identity—the taste of soup, the smell of bread; voice as a bridge between body and soul, where breath physiology and subtle vocal practices build resonance and mutual understanding; mushroom foraging as a metaphor for moving through the dark forests of identity, where we may stumble upon the roots of pride or inferiority. These motifs intertwine into a single stream directed toward openness and inner integrity, enabling the safe exploration of polarization, grounding imagination in local reality, and transforming crises into growth.
For several days, Kaprálův Mlýn will become a shared space for curiosity and experience, supporting the ability to build relationships where they may seem disrupted.
Organizational Information:
Location: Kaprálův Mlýn (https://www.kapraluvmlyn.cz/) is an eco-center located in the Říčka Valley, a nature reserve in the southern part of the Drahany Highlands within the Moravian Karst Protected Landscape Area. This historic scout base offers extensive, comfortable facilities surrounded by nature—steppe meadows of Lysá hora and karst caves such as the prehistoric Pekárna Cave.
Capacity is limited to 35 participants from the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary.
The program will be conducted in English.
Facilitators: Barbora Ciprová, Tereza Čajková, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Ivana Mer, Piotr Sikora, Diana Szantó, Kateřina Vídenová, and others.
Participation in the summer school is fully funded (including accommodation, meals, and travel). A condition of participation is the ability to attend the full program.
Application deadline: May 30, 2026
How to apply?
Please fill in a short application by May 30: https://forms.gle/1grpmNC2WeezFPn5A. In your response, tell us what interests and motivates you about the topic of the Summer School. We will inform you about your participation by May 30.
Credits: visuals and graphics by Marek Meduna
@VisegradFund
The project is co-financed by the Governments of the Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from International Visegrad Fund . The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
What Doesn’t Fit Into a Recipe: Memory, Gestures, and Stories Hidden in Food
What does Central European identity mean to you? Is it the taste of homemade soup, the smell of freshly baked bread, a family recipe, or a memory of the landscape? Or is it something harder to name, yet still carried within us?
The Central European School of Imagination workshop invites you to the shared table. It opens a space for collective reflection on what connects us in our region, shapes us, and where we drift apart.
We are interested in what remains shared even as society becomes increasingly divided. How can sharing experiences, stories, and symbols create space for greater closeness, understanding, and imagining the future?
We will begin with food as a carrier of memory, relationships, and everyday life. With recipes that hold more than just a procedure — family stories, regional traditions, and daily routines. With gestures, scents, and small rituals passed down without needing explanation.
What we will cook together, we will keep under wraps for now. But perhaps this will give you a hint…
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It may seem modest — like dough.
Yet inside, a landscape opens up: potatoes, curd cheese, cabbage, mushrooms, meat, and sweet fruit.
Each bite carries a different story.
They do not demand attention; quietly, but confidently, they invite you.
To sit at the table, to slow down, to converse as it flows between plates and memories.
They are food of the hands and of memory.
They are shaped without grand words.
They are passed on more through movement than through recipe — in how the dough is sealed, how the edge is pressed, how one knows when enough is enough.
In their folds, everyday life meets celebration, poverty meets ingenuity, home meets what is constantly changing.
Perhaps that is precisely why they represent more than just Polish cuisine.
They are an image of Central Europe: layered, shared, changeable — and yet intimately familiar.
All it takes is one bite.
And for a moment, to become part of something that has long been here — and keeps being put together again.
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We will share, talk, and look for images, symbols, and associations we carry in relation to our environment and roots — sometimes consciously, sometimes only intuitively.
The workshop is open to everyone, regardless of experience or profession.
Accept the invitation to taste, and to be part of the shared table for a while.
@VisegradFund
Practical information Date: 3rd June 2026 from 14 - 20h Venue: Vila P651, Pevnostní 65/8, Praha 6 Bring: one traditional recipe or a memory connected to it that means something to you
Central European Summer School of Imagination — Kaprálův Mlýn
Diary of four days, woven with the voices of the landscape
Day 1 — Starting with a map that has no borders
Thirty participants from different corners of the V4 countries arrived at Kaprálův Mlýn today after a long journey. In the June heat, everyone brought something different with them – their own story, experiences, questions, and reasons for being here. The first group circle was for introductions. Not just who we are and where we come from, but also what brought us here.
Then we kneaded bread together. With Kateřina Vídenová, cooking and dining become not just a daily necessity, but an artistic gesture and a quiet manifesto of care, sharing, and the time we devote to one another. The bread that was created today by many hands will sit at the center of our communal table tomorrow. Maybe rituals have never been just about tradition. They are a way to remind ourselves where we are. And with whom. The first bread we baked together thus became the start of a rhythm that will accompany us throughout the four days.
Work that happens without rush.
The fruit comes at the moment when there’s too much of it. When the summer is short but intense. And everything ripens all at once.
It’s not just about processing ingredients. It’s a way to hold onto a moment that’s slowly slipping away. The taste, but also the time that carried it.
For a moment, time slows down. It’s preserved in a way that allows you to return to it differently.
Jars are filled and sealed. Under the pressure that keeps the balance. Like the memory of landscapes that have gone through changes and yet remain whole.
A memory that’s sealed, but never final. Just a small move — and it’s released again.
A space where things aren’t hidden forever, just stored for a while. And then opened again.
Just twist the lid. And summer reminds you of itself for a moment once more.
In the afternoon, Piotr Sykora invited us to the area around the mill. The stream led us all the way to a cave. Some decided to step into the darkness, while others stayed outside, listening to what couldn’t be seen. What was hiding inside? And what, on the other hand, remained undiscovered to those waiting at the entrance? Not everything has to be revealed to change our journey. The forest, after all, tells nothing. It just holds everything side by side. It remembers more than can be seen and invites you to become part of its own rhythm for a moment.
The forest doesn't start suddenly. It comes closer slowly. It thickens. It quiets down. Steps change before thoughts do. Speech breaks into shorter sentences. It's not empty. It remembers more than can be seen. How much it has carried. Silent meetings that weren't meant to be seen. Steps that returned cautiously. Voices that stayed among the trees. And also other traces. Heavier ones. The ones that don't show themselves, but haven't disappeared. The ones marked by the shared history of four countries in the heart of Europe. The ones where layers of time aren't overwritten, they just accumulate. The forest tells nothing. It just holds everything side by side. Doesn't judge. Humanizes.
Just stay for a while. And notice how the past doesn't announce itself loudly.
In the evening, we turned inward. During Tereza Čajková and Barbora Kleinhamplová's workshop, the first layer of a map started to take shape – a map of ourselves. At first, we drew how we see ourselves. Then we tried to capture what we can't see ourselves, but others might. Where does the image we create of ourselves end? And what stays hidden until someone else holds up a mirror for us?
In the countries of Central Europe, time was long measured not just by the calendar, but also by repeating gestures, festivals, and the small acts of everyday life. Rituals that brought people back to a place, a season, and to each other. Some were small and everyday. Airing out the duvets through the window. Sunday lunch. Lighting candles when it gets dark early. Others happened a few times a year — celebrations tied to the harvest, winter, the arrival of spring, pilgrimages, holidays, or moments when it was necessary to pause together for a bit. Many of them started out as very practical needs. But over time they began to carry something more than just a function. A way to remind yourself that you’re not separate from the land or from the cycles that go beyond you. Rituals may never have been just about faith or tradition. More about the need to create moments where you know where you are. And who you’re with.
The end of the day was dedicated to breath and voice. With Ivana Mér, we started tuning into our own voice through breathing exercises – not as a tool for performance, but as a way to listen to ourselves and the space around us. It was just the first step. Tomorrow we'll return to it and continue further.
The first day is behind us. The map is slowly taking shape. And maybe even today we realize that it won’t just lead through the landscape around us, but mainly through the landscape each of us carries inside.
Day 2 — When the landscape starts to respond
The next day we started in the forest. With Piotr Sykora, we set out to look for mushrooms – slowly, with our eyes open for things that don’t show themselves to everyone. Searching soon became more of an exercise in attentiveness than in collecting. Mushroom picking isn’t just about finding something. It’s a way of being in the landscape without laying claim to it. Most of what’s important happens beneath the surface – just like the mycelium that connects the whole forest, the first invisible bonds started forming between us too.
Silent, natural movement. Something that isn’t conveyed through words, more through the way you get up, walk, or stay quiet among the trees.
It’s not just gathering. It’s more a way of being in the landscape without claiming it.
The forest doesn’t feel empty. It’s just that most of what’s in it stays out of direct view. Under every step, something happens. A network that you can’t see, but that holds the space together. Trees, soil, mushrooms — relationships that aren’t explained, they just work.
The rhythm is physical. Bend down, sniff, find, take, clean, let it be. The basket is just a quiet frame. It’s not closed off, it lets things through, gives back, scatters. What’s taken from the forest somehow still stays part of the place.
The scent comes before the decision. It doesn’t say anything, it just shifts your attention.
And your body follows it. Maybe that’s exactly why it all works without explanation. Because it’s not a story, it’s an experience.
Barbara Ciprova followed him and took us through the world of herbs. We didn’t just recognize them by their smell, shape, or name. We tried to understand their place in the landscape and the relationships they create. And also what place we ourselves occupy in this network. In the end, we made oil from St. John’s wort together – a way to preserve the power of the summer sun for later. Herbalism wasn’t passed down through generations mainly by words, but through experience – smell, touch, intuition, and attention. That’s exactly how we learned to read the landscape that day.
Herbalism in the countries of Central Europe was passed down for a long time without words. Through experience, in the way people went to meadows and forests, how plants were gathered, dried, and stored in cloth materials or between the pages of old books.
People knew that some things have their time. That certain herbs are picked early in the morning, others in the quiet of evening, at full moon with bare feet, or only one day a year under the protection of the saints. Not everything was explained. Some things just needed to be shown.
It wasn’t just about healing, but about a certain way of relating to the body, nature, and everyday life. About paying attention to details that are hard to write down in precise instructions — the smell, color, strength of a decoction, intuition, experiences passed down through generations.
The smell of dried chamomile. St. John’s wort hanging under the roof. Hands that know when to pick and when to leave be. And the feeling that some things can only be passed on if you stay close for a while.
After lunch, the next layer of the collaboratively created map continued as part of the Gathering and Diversity workshop. This time, we turned to the voices that shape us throughout our lives. Who speaks to us, even when they're long gone? Which phrases have we taken to heart, and which would we like to let go of? Inner dialogues gradually turned into shared conversations, and individual maps started to connect with the maps of others.
In the late afternoon, we returned to the breads we had baked together the day before. We took them with us on a journey through the landscape. With the singing we had prepared with Ivana Mér, our walk turned into a performative gesture – a thank you for the gifts the landscape offers us every day, and a quiet plea for the rain that the dried-up land around Kaprálův Mill has been waiting for so long.
At the end of the journey, a feast prepared by Kateřina Vídenová awaited us. The bread returned to the center of the circle, and sharing the meal once again became more than just food. We refreshed ourselves with water from a spring fed by underground waters of the local caves – a reminder that the most important things often flow beneath the surface.
We ended the day with singing, sharing, gratitude, and long conversations. Every next step shows that the map we are creating together is not just a record of the journey. It itself becomes a landscape.
Day 3 — What the stone remembers
The third day took us deeper. Into the landscape, under its surface, and into ourselves.
In the morning, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Tereza Čajková, and I headed to the Pekárna cave as part of the Gathering and Diversity workshop. We first explored the cave in silence and darkness. No need to name everything, no rush to discover anything. Just being present in a space that had been forming for thousands of years before us and that for a moment welcomed us among it.
The silence was gradually replaced by voice. With Ivana Mér, we took advantage of the unique acoustics of the cave and let the singing freely resonate through its space. The vibrations bounced off the stone walls, blended with the silence, and for a moment it was hard to tell what came from us and what from the landscape itself. After returning to Kaprálův Mlýn, we continued working with voice and breath and picked up the process that had started on the first day.
Folk and sacred songs in Central Europe long existed in the space between everyday life and ritual. They were heard at tables, in churches, at work, at funerals, and during celebrations. Sometimes quietly and almost incidentally, other times in a way that filled the whole space.
Many of them weren’t known from sheet music, but from repetition. From the voices of parents and grandparents, from the rhythm that returned with the seasons and communal gatherings.
In communal singing, for a moment, you stop orienting yourself just by your own sense. Breathing synchronizes with others. Individual voices remain distinct, but together they create something that one person alone cannot carry.
Maybe that's exactly why these songs have such a special power in the lands of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary. They carry layers of languages, faiths, migrations, and historical breaks, yet often feel familiar even to someone who doesn’t fully understand the words.
Sacred singing brought a rhythm that went beyond the individual. Folk songs, on the other hand, preserved small stories of the land, work, relationships, and losses.
But these two worlds often overlapped more than it seemed.
It wasn't just about the music.
It was more about the way to be together for a while.
How to create a space where you don't have to speak only for yourself.
And maybe that's exactly why singing keeps coming back in this space — even today, in new forms. Because some things are easier to share with your voice than to explain with words.
In the afternoon, our paths split. One group went with Piotr Sykora to continue exploring mushrooms and another of the local caves. In the middle of the underground space, mushroom tea was served, and creations were made from what the landscape itself offered – herbs, flowers, leaves, clay, and water from the cave. At the end, the individual works turned into an impromptu exhibition that let the place itself speak for a moment.
It's called a fly agaric because it invites. Not people — flies, that circle in the air and sometimes let themselves be drawn to something unseen. They land for a moment. They taste. And something shifts slightly. The fly agaric doesn’t lure with force, but with promise. It doesn’t say 'come'; it rather leaves space, where desire decides on its own. Its red isn’t a color, but a signal. Its spots aren’t a pattern, but a map. Maybe that’s exactly why it fits so naturally into Central Europe: into a space where things are spoken halfway, where closeness and distance exist at the same time, where relationships aren’t straightforward, but intertwined like the underground mycelium. You just need to get close enough for the image to start rippling slightly.
The second group with Barbora Ciprová continued exploring herbs. This time through their scents and properties by making hydrosols and natural repellents. Getting to know the landscape turned again into caring – for yourself, for others, and for the space we spend time in together.
School of Exploring Central European Imagination
Today, our lives are changing in ways we could not have imagined a few years ago. In a short time we faced the global health crisis, the war in Ukraine, the cascading effects of climate crises, economic austerity and instability, social fragmentation, political polarisation, large-scale human migration, and more. In terms of polarisation and fragmentation, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in their report “Global trends 2040. A more contested world” already in 2021 suggested that rise in populism can be expected as a consequence of narratives emphasizing the division between the elites and the masses. The NIC (2021) foresees people gravitating to “information silos” with others who share similar perspectives, bolstering their beliefs and understanding of the truth. This may result in increasingly fragmented communities as “people will seek security with like-minded groups based on established and newly prominent identities.” (NIC 2021: p.1). The fragmentation into different opinion groups, social bubbles, echo-chambers, and the associated exacerbation of positions creates a social context in which educators do not dare to raise complex topics related to divisive issues due to lack of experience in creatively working pedagogically with the problems. The annual reports of the Czech School Inspection points out that teachers are often afraid to bring up certain controversial or political topics with children, either because they divide society, or because they do not have one codified interpretation, or because they do not have the appropriate tools to do so.
Experiential formats of learning that are not primarily and only based on cognitive analysis allow us to create a pedagogical space where reflection on the above-mentioned problems can happen in more innovative ways. A pedagogical process based on a complex interconnection of the emotional, social, ethical, and physical dimensions of the topics explored can develop new cognitive and affective skills, especially if it is implemented with a focus on the development of systemic and critical thinking. This project contributes to the development of such a methodological approach by combining the long-term expertise of the participating organisations into a joint approach that will be applied across a series of seminars and one summer school and will be reflected on an online platform. The following local seminars will take place in the three V4 countries and will aim at: 1) reflecting experience with social, ecological, and political crises in the middle-European context 2) discovering sources of support for the development of socio-ecological imagination in the context of the V4 societies 3) developing possibilities for dialogue across differences and polarized societies Through participation in the seminars and the summer school and by using the online platform there will be created a disseminating network of collaborating educators. The long-term consequence of their transformed teaching practice will be reflected in the impact on learners as an increase in the development of their emancipatory and civic capacities.
The project is co-financed by the governments of Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia through Visegrad Grants from the International Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance ideas for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe.
