Landscape Festival Ostrava 2019 Will Reveal New Facets of the City

This year, Ostrava will host an exciting event focusing on urban landscapes and public space: LANDSCAPE FESTIVAL OSTRAVA 2019. The festival will last from late May/early June to mid-October. The event has previously been held in Prague, Plzeň and Opava, and this year Ostrava takes over the baton from these successful host cities.

LANDSCAPE FESTIVAL OSTRAVA 2019 will reveal fascinating new facets of the city, focusing on various environmental aspects of urban life. The main theme of this year’s festival is Communication – viewed in the broadest sense of the word, including not only interpersonal contacts but also physical links between different places. The focus in Ostrava will be on the historic city centre and its connection with the Lower Vítkovice industrial complex.

This is one of the major events of 2019 for Ostrava. It will be the biggest festival of the year exploring and celebrating public space – and the City is a co-organizer. The event will showcase fresh new ways of using public space, bringing new approaches to urban life here in Ostrava. It will involve a range of experts (architects, urban planners and artists) as well as the general public. The festival will offer responses to the needs of several problematic locations within the city – places which need to be revitalized and transformed into more cultural spaces, or places for which we need to find new uses.

The organizing team has designed a number of tour routes which will highlight current barriers within Ostrava’s urban fabric, and the aim will be to test how these barriers can be overcome in order to create a more interconnected city. Ostrava has plenty of experience in seeking out new uses for spaces that are not currently used.

The festival is organized by Prague’s Jaroslav Fragner Gallery in collaboration with the City of Ostrava. Encompassing a wide range of fascinating exhibitions, workshops, lectures and debates, the event presents the very best in landscape architecture from the Czech Republic and abroad. Its most striking component is the use of site-specific installations – temporary projects which revitalize selected locations in cities, respond to their problems and needs, and point the way forward for potential new uses. The entire festival programme is free of charge for all visitors.

LANDSCAPE FESTIVAL was launched in 2014. Since then it has attracted over 500,000 visitors – both experts and members of the general public. This year’s festival in Ostrava is predicted to attract up to 200,000 people.