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Spiritual art at the Forfest.

Article Excerpt
The fourteenth annual Forfest, a festival of contemporary art with a spiritual focus, took place in the week from the 21st to the 29th of June this year in Kromeriz.

As you might expect from the name, it's the town of Zlin that is the capital of the Zlin Region, but the region's cultural centre is without a doubt the town of Kromeriz. Unlike the regional capital, an insignificant village until the beginning of the twentieth century, the region's second largest town is an ancient centre that can boast a genius loci favourable to the spirit of art. Its superb Baroque architecture, above all the Archbishop's Chateau and adjoining UnderChateau Garden, and the whole charming townscape are magnets for people with an artistic sensibility, and so it is no surprise to find that it is a lively centre of musical education (there are two conservatories in Kromeriz) and above all of all kinds of more or less formal arts activities. Among the most important is the Forfest Festival. Forfest's subtitle is "An international festival of contemporary art with a spiritual focus". If we ask how far the festival lives up to the adjectives in its title, we would have to answer that it does so to a different extent in each case. The Forfest is indeed a truly international festival, and its reputation seems to be greater in Europe and overseas than in our republic. Every year many visitors come to the festival from all over the world and it is not unusual to find there are more guests from abroad than from the Czech Republic. This goes not just for the performers but for the composers who are featured in the programme. The share of home and foreign artists is practically the same at the Forfest. Although Forfest defines itself as a festival of contemporary arts in the broad sense it is in fact mainly a music event. This year the imposing exhibition of work by Californian artists called Mind Trips, which opened the festival, was the only presentation of visual art except for the exhibition of Milivoj Husak's Drawings from a Larger...