Book Launch: Tuning the City
27 November 2026 at 17:00
Oucafé, Trenčín
Bringing musicians and performers – amateurs and professionals alike – together with the public and public space requires the courage to experiment and to search for what we have in common.
Tuning the City – a collective sound situation created for the city of Trenčín – filled the city centre with sound over the course of one afternoon and evening in May 2026. Fifty-five City Preludes were performed across the city, along with one large collective event in the square in front of ODA, involving more than 300 professional and amateur musicians of different generations.
Created by Fero Király, Eva Vozárová and Petra Fornayová for Trenčín 2026, the work, developed within the context of the European Capital of Culture, built on the strong tradition of Slovak conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s, including Ladislav Kupkovič, Milan Adamčiak and others.
This unique musical and social intervention was also an educational and community experiment. The main event on 22 May was preceded by several years of preparation: more than one hundred workshops for art schools and the general public in Trenčín and the surrounding area were organised as part of the project. Amateurs, mostly children, made up half of the ensemble of more than 300 participants created specifically for Tuning the City. The other half consisted of professional musicians known from the Slovak experimental and alternative scene, as well as from neighbouring countries.
In autumn 2026, the eponymous book Tuning the City is being published with the aim of presenting and archiving the Tuning the City project. It serves as a chronicle, catalogue, collection of testimonies from participants, and a keepsake for those who were part of it.
Through extensive photographic material, analyses and summaries, interviews with the creators, expert essays, testimonies and reflections on the creative process by artists, organisers and workshop leaders, as well as recollections by teachers of the multi-year educational and creative process, the publication seeks to reconstruct, page by page and in chronological order, the story of a single work.
At the book launch in Trenčín, a discussion with the creators Fero Király and Eva Vozárová, as well as participating artists and teachers, will offer more insight into the publication, the creation of Tuning the City itself, and the multi-year educational preparation process that preceded 22 May 2026.
