Editor’s Picks by Barbora Vanická Čápová

5. 5. 2026

photo: Jakub Tulinger

Selecting only five articles from such a wealth of outstanding content required considerable effort. That is why I decided to create a thematic selection focused on the motif of the island as a parallel in broader ideas about our society: places between acceptance and exclusion. Islands evoke a sense of unexplored territory, a place that could belong to us. But there is a catch: they operate under their own rules. What from the mainland appears different or out of place may, here, find space to exist outside the usual order.

Ad van Denderen – Club Med no more – The Dark Side of Tourism

Artificial environments are often designed as reflections of our desires. Yet when examined more closely, enthusiasm and trust tend to fade very quickly. The photographs of Ad van Denderen invite us on a dangerous journey to a promised land, an astonishing beach with clearly defined beginnings and ends, or to a prosperous oasis of artificially irrigated golf courses in the middle of an arid landscape. In doing so, they create images of fragile islands of our imagination that should perhaps never be visited.

Josef Koudelka – Ruins

Decay can be beautiful, at least in its image. It is not a stable state. It is a process that is constantly unfolding, during which something is both created and destroyed. Objects find new functions, spaces new inhabitants. In Josef Koudelka’s Ruins, past and future seem to circulate endlessly, meeting at the moment when the cycle begins again.

Constantly Ready for the fact that we don’t understand things

Assembling a whole from individual parts can be challenging. But what kind of reality is formed when we proceed from the whole toward details? From a certain perspective, a neurotypical view of the world around us may appear as nothing more than scattered islands in the coherent, clear environment of neurodivergent thinking. In a conversation between Palo Fabuš and Nikola Ivanov, this topic is placed in the context of a time when an entire fauna of new intelligences is emerging before our eyes.

Beyond any Difference – With Olga Moskatova on Image Movement, shifting Materiality, and (Not Only) Digital cameraless Images

A constantly moving digital image seems to lose its contours from one moment to the next: it flows through devices and networks, changing format, resolution, and material infrastructure. In the conversation between Noemi Purkrábková and Olga Moskatova, images become an unstable territory where the boundary between inside and outside dissolves, as does the boundary between autonomy and dependence on a broader, often invisible ecosystem.

Krzysztof Gołuch – Hotel

Quiet corridors and rooms of a hotel where the same faces meet in the same routine tasks. Without haste or stress. The reward is a job well done, and this shared energy creates a protective magnetic field against the outside world. Krzysztof Gołuch’s Hotel is like a floating ark of fragile balance.

Text | Barbora Vanická Čápová, šéfeditorka

Barbora Vanická Čápová

is involved in the dramaturgy and strategic planning of the organization and is responsible for content production for Fotograf Zone and the print Fotograf magazine. She has long been engaged in journalism and artistic research focused on the production and presentation of visual content in hybrid interfaces.