Neglected state of gallery walls of the No. 207 at Prague’s UMPRUM has become an inspiration for a site-specific installation which reflects the matter of homespun chauvinism. Video tutorial of an Arab handyman with the instructions for building a smurf home out of polystyrene, and Czech flag in the colors of pink, pistachio, and creamy yellow, are placed in the gallery next to the Hagal rune. A rune which, in the Czech environment, is being misappropriated by a section of the far right to promote extreme nationalism, while the term Insula symbolizes a reference to the iconographic type of class-based housing.
Insula, in architectural terms, represents a description of a tenement house for lower and middle classes of citizens in the ancient Rome. The first tenement houses structured like multi-purpose buildings with spaces for commerce on the ground floor and residential spaces for the plebs, that is, the bourgeois who had no ancestors among the old patronymic aristocracy, or belonged to no distinguished lineage, located on the upper floors. Blocks of flats of dubious quality suffered from collapses of individual buildings and frequent fires. Tenement flats thus in time began to move further away from the city centers, and into the suburbia. The term „insulae“ was derived from the Latin word for islands, while the original word gave rise to the contemporary term – isolation.