Our Vision.
ArtMill, located in a historic flour mill dating back 500 years, is the base of our organization ArtDialog, a queer-led non-profit focusing on regenerative artistic practice, experiential environmental and arts education. The Red Mill (Červený mlýn) has historically been a place of resistance against oppressive regimes. We strive to continue this legacy, to hold space for communities of struggle and function as an alternative cultural space. Our Center is home to an active community of artists, activists, farmers, and creatives that steward the local ecosystem. ArtMill enables ArtDialog's mission to build cultural discourse through creativity, research, the wider public, experiential learning and education. We practice culture as a catalyst for transformative social change and work in alignment and cooperation with many partnering organizations to maintain the already existing and ever-growing network of centers, cooperatives, communities, farms and individuals working to change the systems of oppression and extraction.
Our vision is to expand the definition of art into the larger cultural context. Our center fosters creativity and its innate connection to the natural world; a place where nature and culture meet that is holistic, experiential, sustainable, and regenerative. We foster a praxis-based, educational environment that grows from grassroots organizing, philosophy and civil society, natural sciences, the arts, and alternative systems of organization. Based on our history with the monumental social and political changes in Central Europe in 1989, from whence our organization began, we are committed to the idea that culture is a fundamental enabler of regeneration, a source of meaning and energy, a wellspring of creativity and a catalyst to change.
Our Mission.
Formerly The Center for Creative Sustainability, we have renamed ArtMill to the Center for Regenerative Art, following the recent paradigm shift from sustainability to regeneration in the field of environmental justice and studies. We work on bringing the pressing environmental and social issues of our time into tangible art forms that regenerate our environment and the discourse surrounding environmental art and social practice. We practice hope-based communication and solutions-oriented art forms to inspire, ignite, and engage the public at large. We host creatives in every sense of the word to join us in the process of invigorating the artistic community around the world through instilling artists with a model for sustainable and regenerative social practice.
From our Founder.
"Why go to the middle of nowhere, in the center of Europe? Because we don't let you turn on your laptop around the campfire at night. There are too many stars to watch and stories to share.
Because there are children born in major cities today who not only prefer the cement of playgrounds to grass parks, but are afraid of the greeness beneath their feet. Because I meet more and more adults who say "Can I come to summer camp?" Because when we create, it is making the intangible tangible; a note on the horn, electricity from the sun, a line into a sculpture. We use that other side of our brain that is intuitive, emotive, and expressive- all things arguably needed for the future of our species.
ArtMill is a place to create. It doesn't have to be art, but whatever you do here, or take away, it will change the world, one molecule at a time. And we are committed to that: making the planet a safe place for all, and teaching sustainability along the way. Our non-profit, ArtDialog takes ArtMill's philosophy out into the world, via exhibitions, catalogues, events, and workshops. We bring people and ideas back to our Center and mix it up in a green environment that challenges the idea that one has to be in a metropolis to make a difference."
BARBARA BENISH
Founder, ArtDialog
Our Team.
Our core team takes turns in stewarding the Mill and its surrounding ecosystem, coming together for our busy summer season to host people from all around the globe. We're a community or artists, activists, farmers, entrepreneurs, designers, and systems-thinkers, all working to help make a habitable world for the next generations of human and nonhuman species alike.
