Frantisek Vanecek, known as Frances Czech nationality Born in 1974

Frantisek Vanecek chose for himself the pen name of "Frances". He has trouble adjusting to being in school, tries out for an agricultural school, again without success. He then decides to work for the railroad company. In the spring of 1992, he spends three weeks in a forest where he gets arrested for vagrancy and is sent to the mental hospital of Horni Berkovice. When he leaves the hospital a few months later, he begins the life of a "homeless anarchist". He starts drawing and writing a journal entitled The Night: poems, religious texts, drawings, collages, all made with different materials (papers, matchboxes, wire grids, nails or train tickets). His everyday life is gathered, sealed into a sort of books made into boxes. It is as if he wanted to fix everything, create memories for himself and for others as not to forget his life in a dreary hospital where he gets brainwashed (he received electroshock therapy) or in a squat. This also explains why Frantisek has left part of his memories to be kept at the ABCD collection. In 1996, he is taken in by the police who find him at the top of a chimney of a nuclear power station. Following an argument with his girlfriend, he breaks the windows of a restaurant, gets arrested again and sent for six months to a mental hospital. After such events, one could wonder whether mental hospitals are not considered more as prisons than establishments to treat illnesses; the communist tradition seems well anchored in these institutions, in which regulations are unfavorable to those who might be uncooperative with the system. Considered a danger to society, Frantisek remains institutionalized.

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