david cerny's entropa

David Cerny's artwork "Entropa" is a symbolic map of Europe depicting stereotypes attributed to the individual member countries.

The piece, an enormous mosaic installed in the European Council building over the weekend, was meant to symbolize the glory of a unified Europe by reflecting something special about each country in the European Union.

But wait. Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.

France? On strike.

The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries. It was proudly commissioned by the Czech Republic to mark the start of its six-month presidency of the European Union.

For“Entropa,” Cerny presented the piece as the work of 27 artists, one from each country. But it was all a huge hoax.

After being challenged by reporters this week,Cerny admitted that he and two of his friends constructed the whole thing themselves, making up the names of artists, giving some of them Web sites and writing pretentious, absurd statements to go with their supposed contributions.

Here David Cerny's text:


"Europe is unified by its history, culture and, in recent years, also by a jointly created political structure.
More or less diverse countries are intertwined by a network of multidimensional relationships that, in effect, results in an intricate whole. From within,we tend to focus on the differences between the individual European countries. These differences include thousands of important and unimportant things ranging from geographical situation to gastronomy and everyday habits.

The EU puzzle is both a metaphor and a celebration of this diversity.It comprises the building blocks of the political, economic and cultural relationships with which we 'toy'but which will be passed on to ourchildren. The task of today is to create building blocks with the best possible characteristics.

Self-reflection, critical thinking and the capacity to perceive oneself as well as the outside world with a sense of imny are the hallmarks of European thinking. This art project that originated on the occasion of Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union attempts to present Europe as a whole from the perspectives of 27 artists from the individual EU Member States. Their projects share the playful analysis of national stereotypes as well as original characteristics of the individual cultural identities.

That much is stated in an official booklet of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However Entropa is not a real pan-European work by artists-provocateurs, but a mystification. At first glance, it looks like a project to decorate official space, which has degenerated to an unhindered display of national traumas and complexes. Individual states in the European Union puzzle are presented by non-existent artists. They have their names, artificially created identities, and some have their own Web sites. Each of them is the author of a text explaining their motivation to take part in the common project. That all was created by David Cerny, Kristof Kintera and Tomas Pospiszyl, with the help of a large team of colleagues from the Czech Republic and abroad.

The original intention was indeed to ask 27 European artists for participation. But it became apparent that this plan cannot be realised, due to time, production, and financial constraints. The team therefore, without the knowledge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, decided to create fictitious artists who would represent various European national and artistic stereotypes. We apologise to Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra, Minister Karel Schwarzenberg and their departments that we did not inform them of the true state of affairs and thus misguided them. We did not want them to bear the responsibility for this kind of politically incorrect satire. We knew the truth would come out. But before that we wanted to find out if Europe is able to laugh at itself.

At the beginning stood the question: What do we really know about Europe? We have information about some states, we only know various tourist clichés about others. We know basically nothing about several of them. The art works, by artificially constructed artists from the 27 EU countries, show how difficult and fragmented Europe as a whole can seem from the perspective of the Czech Republic. We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.

Grotesque hyperbole and mystification belongs among the trademarks of Czech culture and creating false identities is one of the strategies of contemporary art. The images of individual parts of Entropa use artistic techniques often characterised by provocation. The piece thus also lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space. We believe that the environment of Brussels is capable of ironic self-reflection, we believe in the sense of humour of European nations and their representatives."




# Austria, a known opponent of atomic energy, is a green field dominated by power plant cooling towers
# Belgium is presented as a half-full box of half-eaten Praline chocolates
# Bulgaria is depicted by a series of connected "Turkish" squat toilets
# Cyprus is jigsawed (cut) in half
# The Czech Republic's own piece is an LED display, which will flash controversial quotations by Czech President Václav Klaus after the sculpture's activation
# Denmark is a face depicted in Lego bricks
# Estonia is presented with a hammer and sickle-styled power tools, the country has considered a ban on Communist symbols
# Finland is depicted as a wooden floor and an [apparently drunk] male with a rifle, imagining various animals
# France is draped in a "GRÈVE!" ("STRIKE!") banner
# Germany is a series of interlocking autobahns, Upon activation, the cars are supposed to start moving.
# Greece is depicted as a forest that is entirely burned
# Hungary features an Atomium made of its common agricultural products melons and Hungarian sausages, based on a floor of peppers
# Ireland is depicted as a brown bog with bagpipes protruding from Northern Ireland; upon activation, the bagpipes are expected to play music every five minutes
# Italy is depicted as a football pitch with the players holding balls in the "strategic position"
# Latvia is shown as covered with mountains, in contrast to its actual flat landscape
# Lithuanian soldiers are depicted urinating on Russia
# Luxembourg is displayed as a fake gold nugget with "For Sale" tag
# Malta is a tiny island with its prehistoric dwarf elephant as its only decoration
# The Netherlands has disappeared under the sea with only a several minarets still visible; upon activation, this piece is supposed to emit the singing of muezzins
# Poland has a piece with priests erecting the rainbow flag of the Gay rights movement, in the style of the U.S. soldiers raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima.
# Portugal is shown as a wooden cutting board with three pieces of meat in the shape of its former colonies of Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique
# Romania is a Dracula-style theme park
# Slovakia is depicted as a Hungarian sausage (or a human body tighten by Hungarian tricolour)
# Slovenia is shown as a rock engraved with the words first tourists came here 1213
# Spain is covered entirely in concrete, with a concrete mixer situated near the Basque country
# Sweden does not have an outline, but is represented as large Ikea-style self-assembly furniture, containing Gripen fighter planes
# The United Kingdom, known for its Euroscepticism and relative isolation from the Continent, is "included" as missing piece (an empty space) at the top-left of the work