In collaboration with the Czech Embassy and to mark the start of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU, the cultural space La Casa Encendida in Madrid (Rda. de Valencia, 2) is presenting the exhibition Interviews with the Monster, by the artist Eva Kot’átková, until 2 October.
The exhibition presents the work of this Czech artist (Prague, 1982) and looks, on this occasion, at a more mature present in which coexistence occupies a central place. Empathy and relationships between people are the driving force behind this project, which understands imagination as a tool that not only serves to dream, but also to change things by outlining new ways of understanding the other in order to create a limitless us.
Interviews with the Monster is the result of a research project lasting more than two years in which the artist investigated the sheltered housing projects for people with special educational needs that were unsuccessfully promoted in various places in the Czech Republic. In the exhibition visitors will find what appears to be the construction site of one of these buildings that never went ahead, where they are greeted by a series of characters created by the artist with giant cloth heads. These characters represent real and invented (but possible) participants who, in one way or another, were part of the construction processes of this space during the artist’s research process. Normality, discrimination and fear of otherness are present in this exhibition, and it is precisely this fear that dilates what the artist calls “the monster”. The monster is the unconscious panic that seizes us when we look at what is different.
