17. 12. 2025 FAMU Guest Talks: Sára Märc, Four-legged Miners: Drivers of Fossil Capitalism
FAMU Guest Talks: Sára Märc, Four-legged Miners: Drivers of Fossil Capitalism
17. 12. 2025
This lecture emerges from Sára Märc’s long-term artistic research into more-than-human perspectives within the histories of coal mining. It traces the overlooked stories of pit ponies — the thousands of horses and ponies that once laboured deep underground to bring the so-called “black gold” to the surface. These animals not only carried fossil materials but also embodied the industrial and social transformations that shaped modernity itself. Through their stories, the project reimagines Europe’s extractive history as an entangled, interspecies narrative of coexistence and domination.
Sára Märc (they/them) works at the intersection of artistic research and curating, with a particular focus on speculative, new materialist, and postcolonial methodologies. They earned their master’s degree at DAMU in Prague and are now beginning doctoral studies at FaVU VUT in Brno, where they examine the colonial imagination embedded in visions and plans for extraterrestrial mining. Their collaborative practice has unfolded across several interdisciplinary projects, including the postcolonial research project Gutta (conceived by Ludomir Franczak) and the site-specific environmental series Divoká Šárka, created in dialogue with David Přílučík and Rūta Putramentaitė.
From 2021 to 2023, they curated the experimental platform Cross Attic. Today, Sára curates at etc. gallery in Prague, an institution dedicated to the presentation and research of the moving image. Their work has been presented at venues such as Hraničář Gallery in Ústí nad Labem, the National Gallery in Prague, and Studio Hrdinů.