An Empty Pavilion as a Metaphor for the Expansion of the European Union

In 2005, at the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale, the Romanian pavilion in the Giardini di Castello was left empty. The two doors of the pavilion were both left open: the entrance door from the Giardini, and the exit door, towards the park, leading directly to the “real” world, outside the space of the biennale. This was the project of the Romanian artist Daniel Knorr, „European Influenza” and the exhibition was accompanyed by a reader for which the commissioner of the pavilion, the curator and theoretician Marius Babias, has gathered a number of texts on the issue of the EU expansion and Eastern-Europe’s identity self-(re)definitions. The work of Daniel Knorr was not perceived immediately as a crude politically loaded work. The feeling it first roused was rather melancholic, a state of waiting, of looking in two opposite directions. The process of the viewers becoming aware of the work’s multiple connotations was in fact only starting and not ending with the pavilion. Issues raised by the expansion of the European Union, such as local identity versus import of pre-established values, borders (again) and influences (or flues) in this transitory space, which is being politically and culturally recast and remapped created the conditions of possibility for the work to exist but they also constituted ingredients of the discursive space which the work subsequently became part of. I intend to analyze in my project, from an interdisciplinary perspective (sociology of art and political science) the way that some actors of the „art world”, to recall the expression of the American sociologist of art Howard S. Becker, contributed to produce a transgression of art and to fill with political meaning an empty pavilion.