Intervista agli architetti Hsieh Tsung Yen e Andrea Vercellott

La seguente intervista è stata condotta dall’autore di questa tesi, in lingua inglese, il giorno 8 Settembre 2017 presso il Politecnico di Milano, agli architetti Hsieh Tsung Yen (Xie Zongyen 謝 宗諺) e Andrea Vercellotti, organizzatori del Padiglione Taiwan all’Expo di Milano 2015 e viene qui trascritta per confronto ed eventuali successivi studi. Alla conversazione è presente anche Chiu Hao Hsiu (Qiu Haoxiu 邱浩修), Preside del Dipartimento di Architettura dell’università Tunghai a Taichung, all’interno della quale è nata la componente taiwanese del progetto.

ELISABETTA ZERBINATTI:The newspapers were pretty unclear on how the civil initiative began: western media relate it to prof. Vercellotti and prof. Hsieh, while eastern ones talk about an

OPTOGO Project founded by Su Min. For this reason, I would like to understand first your roles and the dynamic between the organizers.

HSIEH TSUNG YEN: I studied here [in Politecnico] so when we knew we were going to have the Milan Expo, in the end of 2014, me and Andrea discussed about what is going to be the Taiwan Pavilion. At that moment we thought that the government was going to do the Pavilion as for Shanghai, we weren’t aware of their renunciation.

Were you attending the same class?

No actually he was my teacher, but we became friends. So, I said “I don’t know but I will check it.” Then checked it online and it said on the news that we refused to join the Expo, because the Expo organization didn’t recognize us as a National Pavilion, so for dignity we chose not to attended to that.

Because you were supposed to participate as “Taiwan corporate”.

Yes, even if we are not an enterprise, so we refused to enter in this kind of way. At that point Andrea asked: “why don’t we just make it ourselves? It’s not a big issue, because Expo is a cultural event just want to see different things and doesn’t care if you are country or not. If we make something just about culture and not politic, we won’t receive any kind of threat by China.”

This was the very beginning and then I went back to Taiwan andstart to ask around for people who want to join this event. Because I had already been staying in Milan for a while I lost all my connections, except for my old university [Tunghai] where I did the master degree. At that period, around the beginning of 2015, we started to gather a group of young architects and also some graduated student from my university. As for the financial issue, the fact that we weren’t an organization made it really hard even to get the documents in the municipality of Milan. So, we decided to group ourselves as an organization of people called OPTOGO, supported mainly by Su Min that became the representative in Taiwan.

So it was you that formed this OPTOGO group?

Yes, OPTOGO means “One Pavilion TO GO”, as we wanted to name our pavilion to make that issue lighter. Having a National Pavilion is more like occupying some land inside Milan and claimed it as your country’s land, like an embassy. Instead we preferred it to be lighter, to be floating in the air of Milan. So we used light structures and bicycles to move around.

In any case, we needed to have some sort of authority, that couldn’t be provided by government’s sponsorship, we had to show that we were not an institution but the people, the citizens. So we wanted to show as much as possible the pictures of all the people that were working together for that to lower the role of the curator, because everybody should was the curator of Taiwan pavilion, it was an horizontal organization. Of course, not everybody had the same role, like for example we needed someone that negotiate with municipality in Milan and Expo and that was Andrea.

This sense that we were authorized by Taiwan’s citizens and not by the government was very important for us, but we didn’t want to make it a big issue for the visitors, we preffered them to just go directly to the content of our pavilion.

Did the Taiwanese government support you at all?

Actually, we visited several mayors all around Taiwan: we visited the one of Taipei city, of Taichung and of Kaoshiung, and they supported us and were very generous, but using the personal founding, their own money. There weren’t any public founding by the government, only personal.

What do you mean by personal? Also enterprises?

No, only physical person. Of course we had the crowdfunding, but that was not the main resource of the money. We created this platform only to let the people participate: they could donate even 10NTD469 _and

they would have felt like they were supporting this event, that is the main reason we did the crowdfunding, not for the money.

You wanted to just light your project up from political issues, but do you know exactly how was the bargaining between Taiwanese Foreign Affair Ministry and the Italian one? Was there any proposal in between or only to be listed as a corporate?

At first the Expo society directly faced our government, so it was the President and Vice-president that have to decide, and they thought that was a damage for Taiwan as a nation, so they refused. It was a yes or no question, but our sense of citizenship made us feel important to be present and what will we show to the public of Milan. When we started to approach the Expo society, we understood that it wasn’t the right interlocutor and we moved from the Expo site to inside the city center, we set our pavilion in Piazza Santo Stefano, because it was easier to discuss with the Expo in Città. The interesting thing was that at first we applied for places that were pretty far from the city center, but then when the Expo in Città society saw our project they were interested and they offered us a better place close to the Duomo.

Why did you choose to have a Pavilion, a restaurant and the vendors?

We separate in three, but they were all at the same level to present the culture. We thought that if we were talking about food and don’t make something to eat in the street is meaningless. We wanted to sell something in the street as it is in Taiwan’s night markets; the first idea was to use the bicycle, but here is not allowed because you cannot have open-air kitchen. So we found a compromise we create a restaurant with the idea of selling Taiwanese food in Italian style.

So your first project was the pavilion and the vendors and then, since you couldn’t sell in the streets, it came the restaurant, right?

Yes.

What were the main ideas you wanted to convey through your pavilion?

The content is not easy to decide, because in that small pavilion you cant’ just present all sort of cultural things related with the different groups of aboriginal Taiwanese, Chinese immigrants, hakkas, etc.. So we collect videos about food from the news and combined them together and show them on iPads. This is the soft content, as for the hardware we inserted three pictures by Shen Chaoliang, a photographer that shoot the “stage trucks”, used in events that ends up un round table dinner, a symbol of Taiwan’s food culture. We chose several things trying to combine them together, maybe it was a bit messy, but for me the idea was that we weren’t not going to present the culture of Taiwan all at once, Milan wasn’t the only window to show Taiwanese culture, there are many other different events such as the Olympic games.

It was a piece of a worldwide window.

Yes.

So why for you was so important to participate at Expo?

This is more personal.