From ideas to the river: how Sladovna Písek engages the city through play

At Sladovna in Písek, we work with art, play, and shared experience as a long-term pathway to self-discovery, relationships with others, and a deeper connection to the surrounding world. We do not focus on just one topic or one place. Instead, we are interested in how children and adults can, through active participation, discover themselves, other people, and the environment in which they live. In the Re-Value project, this approach is more specifically focused on the relationship between the city, its people, and the river. Here, Sladovna’s participatory principles are translated into work with public space, local communities, and new ways of perceiving the area around the Otava River.

Our long-term curatorial concept is A Gallery through Play – an approach in which art, play, guided facilitation, and shared experience are combined into a format where the visitor is not a passive spectator, but an active co-creator of knowledge and of relationships with themselves, others, and the place. We apply this principle both in the creation and delivery of exhibitions and educational programmes, and in participatory formats that open up broader themes of society, landscape, and everyday life.

One of these formats was the Idea Lab – a live creative space in which visitors, together with authors, artists, and facilitators, explored how an idea is born and how it transforms into reality. This principle also underpins the performative programme "Where is an idea born?", which combines movement, music, imagination, and collective creation into one shared experience. For the purposes of the Písek Study Visit, this format – together with a guided visit to Sladovna, access to participatory exhibitions, and an introduction to Sladovna’s core principles – was framed as Re-Value ME. This approach was recently experienced by Re-Value partners during the Písek Study Visit which took place on 21-23 April 2026.

Within Re-Value, this approach also moved beyond the building and into the city itself, most notably through the Mobile City Lab – Sladovna’s travelling caravan, which brings opportunities for gathering, sensory prompts, and the sharing of ideas directly into the places where people live. The Caravan is a format that Sladovna is developing within Re-Value as a tool for place-based work, for opening up people’s relationship to the river and public space, and for inspiring other participating cities. In the next stage of our work in Portyč, we complemented the Caravan’s gentle and sensory dimension with the more active and open format of the Adventure Playground – a temporary playground where children build, decide, and reshape the space themselves using real materials with the support of playworkers. In this way, Sladovna’s broader principles – play, co-creation, and active participation – are transformed within Re-Value into tools for rethinking people’s relationship to the river and to the space they share.

About the partner

Sladovna Písek is the largest gallery for children and their grown-ups in the Czech Republic. In the Re-Value project, it acts as a creative partner of the City of Písek and Smart Písek, connecting art, play, participation, and education in the search for new relationships between people, the city, and the river. You can learn more about Sladovna's work on their website.

Publishing date: 10 May 2026

Authors: Sladovna Písek