This master’s thesis focuses on the legacy of Adolf Parlesák, a Czech interwar traveller, journalist, author and long-distance cyclist. His life story was connected with journeys to Africa, the Middle East and Asia, yet it gradually disappeared from broader cultural memory.
The research is based on a family archive, historical documents, correspondence, photographs, manuscripts, typescripts and interviews with Adolf Parlesák Jr. The thesis explores the relationship between archive, memory and forgetting, and searches for ways to reread, interpret and make a fragmentary personal archive accessible to contemporary audiences.
The outcome is an authorial curatorial libretto and an exhibition installation concept. The exhibition is not conceived as a complete linear biography, but as a space where images, texts, objects, voices and gaps in the archive can meet. Parlesák’s story is approached as an example of memory that has not been entirely lost, but is still waiting to be more widely mediated.
The project also opens up further possibilities for working with Parlesák’s legacy — from an authorial publication through sound and audiovisual forms to the digitisation and institutional anchoring of the archive.
Exhibition Libretto and Visual Concept
The project also includes an exhibition libretto and a visual concept for the installation, developed for the space of Galerie 1 in Prague. The moodboard works with the atmosphere of archive, travel memory, fragments, light, materials and traces that can be reread and reassembled into new connections within the exhibition space.
Working Meeting with the Family Archive
The photographs show a working meeting with Adolf Parlesák Jr. over part of the family archive. During the conversation, preserved documents, photographs and memories opened up, along with questions of how to continue working with this fragile material and make it accessible to contemporary audiences in a sensitive way.
