This project takes its life from two sentences. “This is not our town,” says BATEŽO MIKILU, six high school students from the outskirts of Zastávka, a dysfunctional mining town in the Czech Republic. “This is not a Taiwan Pavilion,” says Esther Lu, curator from a de facto country without a pavilion. After two years of development, Šedá was inspired by the problem shared by these two places: how they are perceived by their surroundings has defined their status quo. She and BATEŽO MIKILU decided to turn this mirror relation into an image of consideration with a deterritorialized topological approach, and show how perception exchange can shed light on a common tomorrow.
The performance and installation inside the venue during the vernissage serve as a second entrance to the 55th Venice Biennale and redirect the audience to see different exhibitions in the 88 international pavilions around Venice with a new imagination of an invisible place, eventually taking form from collaborative action along with the consideration of their chosen audience. Their action demonstrates new perspectives and diminishes the boundaries among pavilions, turning Venice into a commons without walls. Walking through all pavilions with blue shoe covers and asking people for the direction of Taiwan Pavilion, they play the role of strangers to re-orientate the way audience can see the other and the self. Similar actions have been carried out in Zastávka, and will continue to take place there until the end of the exhibition in an attempt to alter social relations in a town that has been washed away in the global economy.
A second view of the exhibition “This is not a Taiwan Pavilion” opens to the public after the completion of their action in Venice on 2 June through the window behind the installation wall, allowing the audience on the undecorated site to contemplate new meanings and next destinations from the juxtaposition of these two mirrored titles.
This project reflects and imagines life in different places and relations otherwise hidden in various global structures—from the art world staged in the Venice Biennale, labor distribution and urban life under the influence of globalization, and political relations conditioned in various power networks to our relationships in the neighborhood. Subjectivity and community eventually communicate: a new reality can be born when a wall becomes a mirror.
To follow their actions in Venice and Zastávka:
Web:www.thisisnotaczechpavilion.org
