Anonymous Hospitality Episode 1, Pardubice 2025

Renders, photo printing, welded metal object 40 × 80 cm

An intervention "It's not thad bad" into the exhibition CECOSLOVACCHIA at GAMPA, Pardubice, Czech Republic 7 - 11.7.2025

The first episode of the project took the form of an intervention in the exhibition CECOSLOVACCHIA (GAMPA, Pardubice, 2025), which transfers the Czech and Slovak pavilion from the Venice Biennale into a regional gallery, detaching it from its representative function. A displaced pavilion of a state that no longer exists, whose architecture is later to be recycled, the exhibition is itself a fragment of memory in transit: unstable, unfinished, impossible to order as a whole. Its tilted, almost falling objects read as relics of an event that has just happened, in a world where things have not yet found their place.

Within this field, the intervention by students of the Intermedia Studio at FFA, It’s Not That Bad, reflected on the precarious position of those who ended up at the Biennale by an unexpected shortcut, skipping stages of an artistic path. This is where the project’s own question begins: how to engage with the archive’s wildness and the fear of its totality. The episode proposes not to catch up with what was skipped but to start from scratch, as a model of coexistence with the archive and of building relationships with the Other through ritual repetition: hospitality, preservation. Here the first form of the work was presented: a metal object with a lamp, photographs and the European pet passport of a guest. A document of belonging that keeps the guest’s otherness, it enters the exhibition anonymously and marks the beginning of mutual auto-archiving, which unfolds in the following episodes.