Impressions from the visitor, David Liaudet 

Kosovo Pavilion in Venice Biennale 2014 was the most surprising. Kosovo Pavilion curator used the Postcard as one of the two elements of the exhibition to take a stand on the Modernity, by making this editorial object at the same time an item of exchange and dispersal but also analysis of the historic, architectural and urban situation of Kosovo.
The Kosovo Pavilion shows facing each other a tower realized with a single object a wooden traditional stool, and a wall of postcards proposing a multitude of old and contemporary images of the country and allowing the vision of the political changes during the last century.At first, undoubtedly this wooden tower realized with stools, basic sitting objects, is magnificent in its modular simplicity and in the optical effect of its shadows and its forms. The stool is not used as a really architectonic object because the stools are positioned on the side and do not hold by themselves, but, fastened together, all these stools form a simple motive, the repetition of which engenders over and over again, a dovecote, a modern or contemporary tower as if this repetition was the only reason of its architecture. It is beautiful, undoubtedly also because from a pure architectural point of view it is useless.Facing this wooden tower, which pays a tribute to the Tradition by diverting from its function (we could also see there a criticism) a wall of images is constituted by postcards which the public can take freely, choosing the ones they like and using the aforementioned stool to reach or see those who are too high. Funny return of the utility of the stool, which finds again its simple role, small useful headland to see Kosovo. It is simple but well said as utility and as symbol...Undoubtedly we are seized with a frenzy of images, my collector's soul wishes them all. And in spite of Claude's call for calm frightened by my bulimia, it was soon him who was the most merciless collector of postcards, taken in his turn by this frenzy. It is necessary to believe that we are not the only ones because post-it ask the public not to take any more certain already missing postcards. I would nevertheless have liked that this disappearance is also a will. Difficult to choose between desire to see and the play of this disappearance of the images!What do they show these images? On the site of the Kosovo Pavilion and by the title of this pavilion, we can guess a regretful look on the disappeared Kosovo, collapsed by the successive politics. The charge is doubtless just and certainly to close so that this political vision, this desire of backward look, offers a nostalgic vision of a country regretting the Modernity, passed on the country by force. Let us make no mistake; the force in question here is the communism and the wars. Nevertheless, the wall of postcards offers an opening by proposing some images of realizations of young architects trained in Switzerland, attracted by the identity reconstruction of this country and make modern and moderate architecture...We shall note that postcards have for starting point either traveller’s images of the beginning of the century, or reproductions of postcards of communist period, or still contemporary photographic missions. All the postcards are large doubling its traditional size and contain in the back always the name of the architects, the photographers and the origin of the images. There are no critics on the nature of these images but their equalization on this wall raises the problem of their hierarchy and the sense of their closeness. Let me repeat, what is the strongest, it is the avidity of the images even before seizing the brutality of the stories that they carry. It is the trap. This jubilation thus stays at first to see, to hold the images, to seize the landscapes and to believe in images. They show, doubtless so, in their position, the state of the country with a powerful and striking collage between the regretted tradition, violent modernity too close to be liked and a present trying to change this pain into a quiet and calmed revival. As such and only in this sense, Kosovo Pavilion is one of the most just and one of the most moving pavilions in the Biennale.
So I have chosen and taken many cards. Like this I have answered perfectly to the Kosovo Pavilion. Undoubtedly the choice of postcards is a sort of self-portrait for each visitor.  

David Liaudet