Villeggiatura

Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands

30.4.2025

Mattia Pajè and Xiao Zhiyu present a collaborative project orbiting a fictional letter — an elusive document penned by an interplanetary expeditionary painter, whose fragmented trajectory entangles colonial exploration, queerness, and cosmic dissent.

Xiao Zhiyu’s Letter to Pieter, a sci-fi epistolary text, serves as a loose point of departure. Its narrative unfolds across a painted notebook, a portrait, a landscape marked by shape-shifting stars, and field notes mapping strange parallels between exotic plants and constellations.

Acting as a bridge between these intersecting threads, Mattia Pajè presents a series of light-based drawings, inspired by the letter and developed through three months of research. These pieces offer visual translations of questions, uncertainties, and speculative inquiries into truth, post-truth, pseudo-science, pseudo-history, diorama-making, and decolonial thought.

The exhibition is part of Participant Presentations series from JvE.

Video documentation here.