A somber atmosphere envelops the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, built around the dialogue between Jakub Jansa and the artistic duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko. Grounded in the metaphorical passage between the underground and the surface – as in a modern reversal of the mythological descent into Hades – the project unfolds through a series of sculptural works of the duo alongside Jansa’s video The Silence of the Mole, which also lends its name to the pavilion.
Here, a hybrid creature – half human and half mole – emerges from a labyrinthine darkness. Its appearance is somehow nostalgic. This being seems to come from afar, perhaps from some forgotten childhood room, where it lay dormant for a long time. Its facial traits, which may have looked placid back then, have hardened over time, adapting to the gloomy aura of the surroundings. In its absorption of the suspended atmosphere, the creature eventually lost its ability to speak.
Nevertheless, the sequence is far from silent. A narration threads continuously throughout the video, both in verse and in prose, recalling the cadence of a nursery rhyme. But here the language has grown corrupted, turning the intimate idiom of childhood into a script marked by a pseudo-institutional jargon.

As if emerging from a buried unconscious, the human-mole appears from a manhole cover in a dystopian Venice, where one can recognize the familiar features of St. Mark’s Square, even if emptied of tourists and seagulls.
Its journey to the surface serves as a political metaphor, where the underground becomes an image of the opacity of decision-making processes, untold rules, hidden negotiations, and subjectivities pushed into silence. The parable of this underworld creature is read as a disillusionment that evolves from the private to the collective, to the point of reflecting, according to the artists and the curator, Peter Sit, the very conditions and contradictions of the two countries it represents. Jakub Jansa and Selmeci Kocka Jusko chose to reply to these contrasts by joining forces, presenting the two works as a unique project. This structural dialogue is embodied by the physical presence of Selmeci Kocka Jusko’s sculptural installations, which create a continuous exchange with Jansa’s video. In fact, the sculptures also appear within the video as constructive elements. This co-presence generates a vibrant ambiguity between fiction and reality, as well as between the moving image and the spatial design. As they refuse to clarify their function, these almost architectural forms leave the viewer suspended in the attempt to interpret their origin, all while sharing a sense of emptiness that draws them into an enigmatic past.