In 1565, the Medici family tasked the architect and painter Giorgio Vasari to build a passageway linking the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti that would overlook the city of Florence. The construction would fulfil several functions: it would enable the Medici to remain physically separate from the people, to observe activities within the dwellings from a distance and to compile a collection of distinctive self-portraits by famous painters, which up to this very day decorate the crossing of the gallery. Functioning as a place for both withdrawal and observation, the passageway can be seen as an allegory for the centre for contemporary art, whose ambivalent place in cities turns it into a heterotopia.

The project borrows its title from this historical background and metaphorically gives Chinese workers/painters specialised in copying masterpieces the opportu- nity to make their own self-portrait (a total of 25). By corrupting the pictural genre into a means of representing an invisible workforce, they contribute to a factory that defies the production mechanisms of globalised markets. The power relationships that go hand in hand with commissioned orders are changed in a way as to increase the visibility of the workers.