A famous picture taken in 1977 shows Nicolae Ceauşescu looking at a model of the future Bucharest from a sliding bridge and giving advice to architects. Years and decades have passed since then, but the metaphors and unspoken meanings hidden behind that image remain.
The authors of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale – Tiberiu Bucșa, Gál Orsolya, Stathis Markopoulos, Adrian Aramă, Oana Matei and Andrei Durloi – moved from that particular image to wonder if as individuals we stand on or under that sliding bridge, and give or receive orders.
Rather than finding definitive answers, the team behind this installation (comprising architects, puppet masters, craftsmen and creative minds) suggests visitors to try and take both the positions via a set of mechanical automata.
The creative space actually starts at the New Gallery, located on the ground floor of the Romanian Cultural Institute (Campo Santa Fosca, Palazzo Correr), where you can see "The Menagerie of Wishes", a series of wooden puppets sitting, crouching or playing with a golden egg in the windows, while inside you will discover a hen and a goldfish automata.
At the door of the Pavilion in the Giardini a man operates a small theatre with two automata battering each other and a wooden bird flying around a cage.
Inside the pavilion there are further pieces with handles and pedals making the shows possible: a bicycle moves a circle dance; a cooking pot activates a series of puppets sitting in a sort of "Last Supper" formation at a long table, with one of them eating out of a plate with two revolving buildings on top – The People's House and the Romanian People's Salvation Cathedral; while a crank awakens a commission sitting in front of a dead fish (symbolising the subject of debate) in a side room.
The figures banqueting represent the power table to which many architecture graduates arrive only to discover that most of the good seats are already taken in this system; yet the team behind the pavilion reminds us that this reason will help new generations to explore issues in most divergent directions, pushing in this way the system to its edges.
The handmade wooden characters may look very similar, but they actually impersonate different figures you may stumble upon in your life as an architect or artist: the pavilion guide indicates indeed that among them there is "one who always says yes", "one who points at you", "one who always says no", "one who applauds any initiatives", an "undecided thinker", and "one tired of so many discussions", just to mention a few.
The mechanically operated wooden puppets mime the construction and deconstruction of our behaviours and the movements and anatomical mechanics of "human" puppets.
The wooden puppets are lively, but artificially animated, and visitors become their dynamos or the actors in a closed and cyclical scenario: to set the scenes in motion, visitors must turn into the protagonists of the puppets' stories, becoming in this way also "victims" of the scenes in which the puppets are trapped.
Though the puppets have all the necessary joints that would allow them to move, they are nailed to a mechanism and can therefore perform only one repetitive movement; in the same way, visitors can only make one movement to set the scenes in motion.
The curators and the creative minds behind the pavilion prompt therefore visitors to connect animation techniques in the puppet theatre with what happens in real life and in various disciplines and fields such as religion, propaganda, education, advertising and architecture.
We usually think the puppeteer animates the puppet that in return animates the audience, but in this case the puppeteer animates and manipulates the audience that, in return moves the puppets. The latter are therefore tools that extend our abilities to mock ourselves and communicate theatrically with others we can not control.
Reuniting art, architecture and theatre together via the automata, the project poses questions about the position of the individual in relation with other people, while inviting visitors to think about social mechanisms and the role of the individual in their making and functioning.
Some of the multiple messages behind the pavilion aren't immediate, but seeing wooden handmade puppets being used (in our digital age) as vehicles for rather complicated metaphors and as a form of critical entertainment show is refreshing.
Last but not least, the automata offer via a narrative installation an alternative to the "selfie" culture: the puppets are representations of humanity through the ages and they can be physical "selfies" of architects or of the people in power, and the cranks and handles that activate them discourage visitors to take their digital self-portrait and to leave their smart devices behind for a while to share not a self-oriented moment but a brief theatrical experience with the rest of the world.
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