Participy: I use this term for events designed for a specific place or situation.   

In the analogy of SOCIAL, I see the term participatory as a particular social action related to the period of 1999-2000, when I started using this term. In retrospect, it was an act of deciding to enter a social space and include elements of socialization of ordinary everyday activities. Without defining it more precisely, intuitively I was concerned with a kind of equating of everyday activities with the exclusivity of the social status of art and a kind of equating of spaces for display.

Particip No. 197 is based on Particip No. 191, which I have been creating since the beginning of this year. Almost every day I draw simple drawings on a mobile app to comment on, to record certain events of the day. I call these drawings sms, short business messages, and publish them on Facebook. In total, approximately two hundred and fifty drawings have been published since January 2016. In part 197 I present selected drawings in the gallery space.  I temporarily materialize their immaterial destination. By immateriality I mean the form in which they are established, preserved and further distributed. They are created through the simple physical act of touching a mobile phone screen. Everything that happens after that is a matter of the digital world, the immaterial space in which they inhabit and communicate.

In Participant No. 197, which is exhibited at the Kabinet T. Gallery in Zlín, I have attempted to translate the short service messages in question into a temporary physical state. I asked thirty pupils of the Gymnasium on T. G. Masaryk Square in Zlín to redraw selected drawings, printed on A4 paper, with a black marker on the gallery walls. We tried to make the drawings once told (particip no. 191) to be retold again with all the risk of directness, cut and freshness (particip no. 197).

In a way, this is a retrospective of one particip.

Text: Tomáš Vaněk