Institutional Affects in a Romanian Docu-Noir
From a postcommunist vantage point, the Romanian recent past seems cast in deep shadows and strong contrasts, whereby the gloomy darkness always falls on the same political grounds. The communist past is often described as black (The Black Book of Communism) and heavy (“the lead cap of communism”) and successfully counterbalanced by a luminous, bright “post”, perpetually projected onto some near or distant future. The spacetime of “post” has no official definition other than in contrast with “communism”. All these film lighting tricks and special effects are practically part of an unwritten manual full of guiding rules for staging the 20th century in Romania.
Local experts act de facto as state sponsored special agents. They examine archives, collect proofs, cut&paste biographies, issue reports in order to single out the original perpetrators and their crimes. The emotional surplus value of archives plays a key role in this process. However, the very existence of these archives was made possible by the bureaucratic ambition of the former Securitate which basically commissioned this huge (auto)biographical “literature” of mutual surveillance. Hard facts are impossible to detach from nightmarish fiction.
The casting session is open for artists, designers, sound engineers, filmmakers and writers dealing with recent history. They are invited to play a part in this film, convinced it will be a national blockbuster.
Book covers, posters, sound installations, exhibition displays, monuments are all props for this multimedia fiction. The Romanian New Wave is influenced by the same cinematic rules of docu-fiction. The depictions of the communist experience rely on powerful negative affects: drama, trauma, self-victimization, under the pretense of objectivity and realism.
Friday, 4 November at 7 pm
DAZ, Trg bana J.Jelačića 1/3
Zagreb
in the frame of M I K R O P O L I T I K E
Focus of the lecture series Mikropolitics in 2011 lies on exploring spaces in which contemporary art is generated, produced and respresented, especially on niches, those inbetween-spaces between galleries, museums and so-called off-spaces. We perceive their inbetween-status as a chance for a wide-ranging approach, where an exhibition becomes a kind of dispositif, context-based and –oriented cultural praxis which communicates through specific social-political questions.
For previous lectures see www.mikropolitike.org
(new project website under construction)
organizer: [BLOK]
Biankinijeva 3/1
Zagreb
