1. When you were invited to be a member of the jury that selected the project for the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2007, were any strategies or methodological norms regarding the evaluation procedure communicated to you? Can you detail?

2. What were the general criteria for selection and the priorities that you applied to the participating projects?

3. What were, in your opinion, the qualities that detached the winning project from the others?

4. Do you have any suggestions for improving the selection procedure?

 

1. The voting procedure was communicated to us (printed and added in each folder), but no strategy was mentioned. Probably, our job was considered to be the selection from the existing material, not the following of a strategy.

 

2. The selection criteria were established by each of us based on personal wit. I took account of certain appropriateness of the project to present developments, and its relevance for Romanian art in international context.

I cannot overlook how important is the way in which the project will be translated into reality in the pavilion and the fact that you are engaged as an athelete running beside others within the exhibition system of the Venice Biennale. In other words, neighborhoods count, you cannot ignore the things around you. For this reason, some projects focused on a particular artist, immeresed in his or her own quests already known to the public, seemed irelevant, because they did not bring anything new.

 

3. The winning project (selected by unanimous decision, which is a rare thing!) presented a small group of young artists who choose to express themselves in different media, without dogmatically or boringly advocating a particular art form. I think a certain freshness and irony that seduced all the members of the jury caught also me. Without being pedant, the project had elegance and easiness, in a visual form that appeared interesting to me. 

 

4. I think that the president of the jury must be a professional, a person able to set up and impose a certain strategy and not the representative of the Ministry of Culture, who could take over further responsibility of supporting the unfolding of the winning project. Periodical change of the jury’s members should probably be pursued in order to insure a certain alternation of visions. 

 

Ileana Pintilie