Silence of the Mole: 61st Venice Biennale

We are delighted to announce that Jakub Jansa, represented by KodlContemporary, is participating in this year’s Venice Art Biennale. Together with the Slovak artistic duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko (Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko), he will represent the contemporary Czech and Slovak art scene in the national pavilion.

Silence of the Mole is a film set within the environment of galleries, institutions, and cultural representation, where imagination becomes entangled in the mechanisms of soft power. The story follows Mr. M., an aging performer who has spent his entire life embodying the beloved children’s character of the Mole. His language is simple and folk-like: he communicates through gestures, exclamations, and primitive musical instruments — vozembouch percussion devices — used as part of his playful performances. Yet this fragile world of small sounds, fantasy, and empathy is disrupted by a political decision that removes Mr. M. from the realm of innocence and imagination, transforming him into a tool of cultural representation.

It is precisely his apparent neutrality and universal recognizability that make him an ideal figure to represent culture on the international stage. Mr. M. is sent to a major biennale as someone “everyone knows,” a character audiences can easily identify with. He brings the same folk-inspired performance, once rooted in the intimate scale of everyday life, into the monumental space of the exhibition pavilion. This time, however, his language fails to meet the expectations of the audience. The sounds of his instruments gradually fall silent, and the simple poetics of imagination begin to collapse within the context of the global art world.

Following the unsuccessful performance, Mr. M. retreats backstage into a labyrinth of corridors and storage rooms resembling a mole’s burrow. There, he undergoes a quiet catharsis and confronts the role imposed on him by the system of cultural representation. Silence of the Mole becomes a poetic allegory about the moment when the language of imagination is torn from its natural environment and sent to represent a world to which it does not belong — and about the silence that follows once this language ceases to function.

The film is produced under professional cinematic conditions with an extensive crew and filming across multiple locations. Costume designer Karolína Juříková developed a unique woven textile specifically for the costume of the main character. Sound and music play a central role in the project, with an original score and sound design by Oliver Torr, further developing the motif of gradually fading instruments. Cinematography is by Tomáš Kotas.

A number of specially developed artistic elements were created for the project, including original musical instruments produced in collaboration with the sculptural duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko and Plátna Studio. The film was created in close dialogue with the exhibition project Silence of the Mole for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.