1. Briefly, what is the concept of the project with which you have applied / what artist/artists have you proposed?

2. What is the motivation for applying for the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale?

3. What are, in your opinion, the qualities that would meet the organizers’ requests and that your project possessed?

4. If you were invited to be a member of the jury for the next edition, how would you improve the evaluation procedure?

1. The artists are Cristi Pogacean, Victor Man, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. Each of them will participate with an existing work and one or two works created especially for the pavilion. The theme is the contemporary monument and the need to re-think it, by contrast with everything we know about the traditional monument, about populisms, nationalisms and false victories. that is to say monuments for today, which neither glorify nor commemorate, but insert themselves in social life. Polemic monuments.

2. Venice is a place that affords visibility to a project which aims to attract more and more competences, vital for the health of public space, towards a research on monuments and on ways to re-signify them. A projects that is not “national”, since it proposes connections between several spaces where monuments are problematic, communities confused and histories traumatic.

3. The exibition is designed neither around a checklist nor to reflect the jury’s preferences, hoping to touch each of its members. So I don’t know the answer to this question, as I miss the criteria that the project I proposed in 2005, The Endless Pavilion, failed to meet.

Although the procedure and the situation are the same, there was no debate in 2005, except for a series of ‘reactions’ in Observatorul cultural and a pseudo-polemic between Tudor Octavian and Nicoleta Esinescu. We have to establish if we are talking about a system that is wrong or about a system that is functional yet sometimes fails. We also need to establish whose aspirations for representation must be fulfilled by the Pavilion in Venice.

4. First of all, I would propose to organize the evaluation procedure a year before the Bienalle and the call for projects a few months in advance of the jury meeting. I don’t know anything about the evaluation procedure itself, except that it is based on a system of awarding points to the various projects, a system that is probably as questionable as any other.

Mihnea Mircan