Broumov Monastery, located in the north-east of the Czech Republic just below the Polish border, is a majestic baroque complex and former monastic community. It was founded in the early thirteenth century by the Benedictines of Břevnov, based 100 miles south in Prague. By the eighteenth century Broumov had become ‘a supra-regional centre of culture and education’. That’s according to the catalogue for Monika Čejková’s exhibition Dom Sylvester Houédard: Endlessly Inside, which ran at the monastery from June to October 2023. The show was part of the Ora et Lege (‘pray and read’) curatorial project, whose title adapts the Latin Benedictine credo ‘Ora et Labora’ (‘pray and work’).

The pieces on display by Houédard range from magnificent, rococo typewriter-art constructions creating illusions of three-dimensional depth (Edwin Morgan dubbed them ‘typestracts’) to ‘reversible’ poems, with letterforms, found objects and materials suspended in transparent sheets of plastic, designed to be viewed from both sides. Meanwhile, in the monastery’s library are examples of Houédard’s poetry publications, produced by his and John Furnivals press Openings. The library itself is a lavish, two-storied, barrel-shaped vault created during the early-eighteenth-century restoration that gave Broumov its current appearance. Prior to the First World War, the library contained 45,000 books, ranging from law and church history to philosophy, medicine and architecture. This collection was systematically neglected and plundered after 1945, particularly after the dissolution of the monastery by the governing Communist Party in 1950. (Returned post-Velvet Revolution to the Břevnov order, Broumov is now open to the public, though the monks never returned.) ...