Photo Exhibition - Marek Audy: Tepuy 2009
Marek Audy: Gates into the lost world. The eight years of exploring underground spaces of Table Mountains in Venezuelan Guyana’s highlands.
Profile:
“I recall as Zolo pulled two head lights out of his backpack and told me: “Let’s go!” At the first notion the corridor seemed to be low but then it started to get bigger and bigger. In the massive dome we realized our nothingness and at the same time the tremendous value of our discovery. In the smooth rocky bottom we found two sinuous openings that look like eyes. I immersed my forehand into this opening and I pulled out handful of clear, transparent, shiny flattened crystal balls. “
Marek Audy after discovering the cave Crystal Eyes
- Marek considers Venezuelan Table Mountains as the most magical place of the world.
- When discovering caves Marek is mostly scared of flooding water, cave-in, and the “common” slip.
- His goal is to visit places that are not explored yet and far from civilization.
- The dream of each speleologist, as well as Marek’s, is to get lost in an undiscovered cave:-).
That is a brief business card of Marek Audy, the most significant Czech as well as world wide acknowledged speleologist, traveler, adventurer, discoverer, explorer, and this year guest of our festival Horyzonty. Besides of speleological interests Marek has been dedicating his free time to photography since his early 15, mostly pictures of the underground. His works were often awarded at various international exhibitions focused on speleological theme. He decided to stroke out photography carrier in the track of his father, famous photographer Igor Audy.
He organizes exploring expeditions to Table Mountains of Guyana’s highlands in Venezuela. In this area, together with other Czech, Slovak and Venezuelan speleologists, they explored and discovered 28, 5 km of cave spaces during the years 2004-2009.
In the year 2002 Marek Audy added to his account the most significant discovery; the cave Cueva Ojos de Cristal (Crystal Eyes). It is the longest (16 km long) horizontal quartzite cave in the world. Co-discoverer was Zolo Ágh and the cave is situated in the Table Mountain Roraima.
In 2005 the Czech-Slovak-Venezuelan expedition performed their exploration at the most spacious massive of Table Mountains – Chimanta. The head of this expedition was Mr. Charles Brewer – the best expert on Tepuy, world wide acknowledged botanist, discoverer of several new species of herbs and animals, and discoverer of the largest underground space into which the human foot had never stepped before. Its name Cueva Charles Brewer was granted according to discoverer itself, and the aim of this expedition was to explore this cave. For illustration of this gigantic cave, just its largest corridor demonstrates the volume of 400 000 cubic meters.
In this area Audy performed several systematic explorations of fauna and flora inside as well as on the surface of Table Mountains. In the largest quartzite cave they discovered prehistoric forms of life, new species of scorpions, spiders, grasshoppers, centipedes, and new sorts of human-dangerous mushrooms, mildews and bacteria. What is more, the cave presented a danger of excessive amount of carbon dioxide.
This expedition offered a fantastic theme for a movie and there was filmed a very impressive movie from the workshop of Pavol Barabas with the name TEPUY – Journey to the depths of the earth.
This year Marek Audy organized another discovery expedition called Muchimuk, which was again directed to the Tepuy Mountains, to the district of Table Mountain Churí. New proterozoic quartzite caves have been discovered and explored, and they also discovered second most gigantic quartzite cave in the world called Cueva Muchimuk.
Besides of that, Marek have participated and organized other expeditions to subalpine karsts in Austria and Kosovo, and as a passionate kayaker he has rafted down wild rivers of Big Jenisej in Siberia.
During his active speleological work Marek has participated in several cave expeditions from which he has brought a great amount of unique photographs. These will be presented by himself to Trencin’s audience and visitors of our festival Horyzonty.
