Transition Worlds is a video program that focuses on personal, environmental, political, social, economic, and psychological change in recognition of the ongoing global turbulence started in 2011. It features international artists from Berlin, Geneva, Chicago, Petersburg (Russia), and Romania.
The program will take place at the Artfoyer, an independent art space located on Albisstr. 27, Wollishofen, Zurich and is curated by Olga Stefan, a freelance arts journalist, curator, and events organizer.

February 29, starting at 7pm
In Transit, Joanne Richardson
30 min, 2008
In Transit is a diary of a journey through space and time, made up of subjective impressions of the present and childhood memories of the past. While traveling across Romania in the year of its EU accession, the monologue reflects on the meaning of transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory.

Noé, Pauline Julier
22 min, 2010
The viewer sees through the eyes of Noah, taken to the end of the world to a place where all seeds are kept safe. He can no longer stand the ordered space in which he is enclosed to live and decides to leave. Outside the world has disappeared under the ice. Poetic metaphor for a state of lucid madness, the film suggest the possibility of a world uninhabited and sterile, a white nightmare…

Following the Line of Arguments: Strada Fabricii, Cathleen Schuster/Marcel Dickhage
6:30 min, 2010-2012
The film is in the form of an essay and follows the relocation of the Nokia plant from Bochum to Cluj, Romania.

About the artists:
Joanne Richardson is a media theorist and video artist currently living in Berlin. She completed an M.A. in philosophy at New York University, and postgraduate studies in critical theory and film & video at Duke University. From 2002-2009, she was the co-founder and director of D Media (www.dmedia.ro), a Romanian NGO active in the intersections of art, activism and new technologies.

Pauline Julier graduated from the Institute of Political Studies of Grenoble in 2002 and from the school of Photography of Arles in 2007. She presents some of her films in collective exhibitions and film festivals in Paris (Centre Pompidou) or in Berlin, Zagreb, Basel, Geneva, Lausanne, Lyon, Grenoble. Her movie Pamiec had been published in 2009 to Waknine Editions (http://margueritewaknine.free.fr). She received the 2010 Swiss Art Award in Art-Basel for the installation of her last film : Noah. Pauline currently lives and works in Geneva.

Cathleen Schuster and Marcel Dickhage live and work in Berlin and have been collaborating since 2001. Both studied together in the Class of Photography and Media at the Academy of Visual Arts of Leipzig (Prof. Heidi Specker).

March 8, starting at 7pm
Lessons on Dis-Consent, Chto Delat?
18min16sec, 2011
This work continues the development of musicals (Songspiel *) over which Chto Delat? and composer Michael Krutik have been working for the past 3 years. Lessons on Dis-content is a concert given by a “chorus of patients” in the context of Chto Delat?’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, that engages in dialogue with the audience on the nature of communism, health, and the future of our society.

On Blind Faith, Gabriela Vanga
9min9sec, 2010
Eight children smash over two hundreds china figurines against a wall, in a nondescript urban setting. Then the shards of china are picked and grouped, the figurines are patiently pieced and glued together. Plural symbolic extensions coalesce into a meditation on education, but also beyond, obliquely inquiring into social processes of learning and unlearning, their effects and aftereffects – invoking all and not settling for any single interpretation.

Battling Inertia, Matei Bejenaru
14min, 2011
Battling Inertia was the name of the literary circle of a factory in Iasi, Romania. Founded by one of the workers of the factory, it offered an opportunity for hobby poets and writers to share their compositions and literary interest after work. This documentary focuses on the founder’s story.

What is Capitalism, Dara Greenwald
10min, 2006
A failed attempt to understand capitalism, do we experience it so fully that we can’t even put it into words?

About the artists:
The platform Chto delat/What is to be done? was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.

Gabriela Vanga was born in 1977 in Bucharest, Romania and currently lives and works in Paris, France.

Matei Bejenaru is an artist, media professor, and the founder of Periferic Performance Festival in Iasi, Romania. He currently lives and works in Iasi.

Dara Greenwald was the director of the Video Data Bank in Chicago, an arts activist, artist, and organizer. Her exhibition, Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960′s to Now, co-organized with her partner Josh MacPhee, made an essential contribution to the understanding of art’s impact on social movements. Dara passed away at the age of 40 on January 11.

Upcoming exhibitions at Artfoyer, curated by Olga Stefan
Fire it up: Ceramics as Medium in Contemporary Sculpture – Mark Divo and Pascal Häusermann
Vernissage, March 15, 7pm

Lost in Translation – Teresa Chen featuring Cat Tuong Nguyen
Vernissage, April 4, 7pm

Thomas Killper – A Lighthouse at Lampedusa project

Thomas Hirschhorn – Where Do I Stand? What Do I Want?, 2007

Francis Alys – The MAKING OF, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002

BUUUUUUUUU – One minute smile against Berlusconi, 2011

Political Slogan, 2011

Michael Bielicky and Kamila B. Richter – Garden of Error and Decay, 2011

Lucy Kimbell – Physical Bar Charts, 2011

DEMOCRACIA – Ser y Durar, 2011

Artur Zmijewski – Democracies, 2009

Anne Mosseri-Marlio Gallery, Zürich, CH

At first, Société Réaliste’s Zero Euro (2010) and Infinite Dollar (2011) sculptures seem like facile comments on the economic situation and the stability of the political structures supporting them.

However, knowing the research-laden process of the politically engaged French collective, it was not a surprise to find that aspects from the history of symbols, economy and power were embedded in those simple signs. For their Swiss gallery debut, they explore the connection between writing and architecture. In the impressive wall installation Commonscript (2011), 24 stills from The Fountainhead (Société Réaliste’s recreation of the eponymous 1949 Ayn Rand movie, but sans people and sound) bring the viewer further and further into a media mogul’s office overlooking the modernist city below. These are interspersed by 24 enamel panels with short quotes by Howard Roark, Rand’s hero of extreme individualism and integrity. Changed from the singular to the third person plural, the quotes take a much more ominous character, as they seem to describe an elite group concerned only with protecting its own interests. The juxtaposition of quotes and architectural images creates a convincing indictment of capitalism, as the “they,” the power holders, “will not consider anybody’s judgment but their own.”

Modernism’s idealistic failures are the sub-text of the exhibition throughout. From Le Corbusier’s plan of La Ville Radieuse, which appears at the center of Hazard Abolished (2011), an almost architectural transcription of the English translation of a Stéphane Mallarmé poem; to the lightboxes that criticize the bombastic architecture they represent with short and poignant comments like function as fiction as function; and ending with Fingerprint Architecture: Switzerland (2011), an installation of a pile of books laid out in the same pattern as the design of the cover and inside pages, but that in fact represent empty fingerprint books totaling the number of undocumented migrants to Switzerland in 2010 — the work of Société Réaliste is a philosophical battle against the myths that we hold dear about our society’s liberties and values. And for this exhibition, this philosophical battle chooses the gallery as its site, a highly contested space, where capitalism and utopianism clash to create a hybrid form: reality.

Club Electro Putere

Lia Perjovschi CAA and Rudolf Bone

The Bureau for Melodramatic Research

Center for Visual Introspection

From the Vernissage, Thursday, December 8, 2011

“Romanian Hospitality”, Paradis Garaj

h.arta

]]> http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/just-another-brick-in-the-wall-exhibition-and-vernissage/feed/ 0 olgaistefan 376328_10151026445315123_597695122_21594003_1595493806_n 386189_10151026444775123_597695122_21593997_635634615_n 393484_10151026445125123_597695122_21594001_602709890_n SONY DSC IMG_4196 SONY DSC L1007354 L1007454 SONY DSC L1007396 L1007435 IMG_1579 http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/just-another-brick-in-the-wall-interview-with-the-bureau-for-melodramatic-research/ http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/just-another-brick-in-the-wall-interview-with-the-bureau-for-melodramatic-research/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:57:35 +0000 olgaistefan http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/?p=856 ]]> The Bureau for Melodramatic Research is an art project initiated by Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa, who live and work in Bucharest.

OS: Your practice aims to reveal how our emotions are manipulated by the power structures to create the narratives that support the status quo, or those structures’ legitimacy. How did this interest develop? Can you give us some recent examples in Romania where melodrama was used to convince the population of a particular agenda?
BMR: Ever since the beginning of its activity the Bureau has taken a critical view of the genderization (that is feminization) of emotion: the representation of the woman as a reservoir of sentimentality, built in opposition with a presumably masculine reason. This is part of a historical process of disciplining women, which reached a peak in the 19th century with the medicalization of hysteria. The women were gradually cast as over-emotional, irrational, dangerous beings in order to safely attach them to the domestic sphere and ensure the fulfillment of reproductive tasks.
On the other hand, emotion is presently taking over the public sphere. We are witnessing unrestrained pathos overflowing public discourse under the guise of technocratic objectivity insistently claimed by public institutions. This is not only a characteristic of Romanian institutional sphere. All across Europe and North America political rhetoric gets sentimental infusions, accompanying the neoconservative backlash. One of the local instances BMR has been investigating is the melodramatic re-writing of recent history by such institutions as IICCMER The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes or CNSAS The National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives. Their official anticommunist discourse is backed by the current political power and contributes in turn to its legitimation, with the help of a positive re-affirmation of the interwar period. There have been consistent efforts from the Romanian neoconservative intellectuals to gild the 30’s in a dramatic opposition to the communist period, thus dissimulating the scientific racism, antisemitism and eugenics of the period.

OS: In much of your work and artistic statements, you express criticism towards corporate funding of the arts. In a country like Romania, whose government does not see funding the arts as a priority, and where the public is disconnected from, and uninterested in, the contemporary art discourse, who is left to support and fund practices like yours?
BMR: The problem of state funding stands not only for Romania, but for the countries of the so-called former west as well, where rampant political conservatism goes hand in hand with the neoliberal economic doctrine. Moreover, the recent government cuts resulted from the global crisis of capitalism have affected a wide range of social areas, such as education, the health system, social security. There is no exceptional case of art and culture. In this respect, the pretension of autonomy that some of the artists and theoreticians have been recently trying to argue for is not a coincidence. It maybe expresses a financial worry rather than a theoretical preoccupation and in the present political context their claims are rather inappropriate and disproportionate. It would be a stronger position to focus on solidarity of art and culture with the general demands of broader social categories.
What about the state of art funding in the countries of the Third World who were historically constrained to look up to Western culture industries and internalize a condition of the peripheral, of the cultural subaltern? How are their struggles of resistance being supported?
We have got most of the funding for our practice from foundations representing government and corporate interests alike in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. We have received travel funds from the Romanian Cultural Institute and some years ago even from the Ministry of Culture. As for corporate funding, our main concern is that artists should be paid especially if they work to raise the symbolical capital of a bank or corporation by participating in an exhibition/biennale/project. Last time when we participated in a project funded by a bank in Bucharest, we didn’t receive any fee for our work – absolutely no financial support for our practice. This particular experience was the onset of a collective struggle of artists and other cultural workers alike for equitable compensation.
On the other hand, if we expect funds exclusively from banks and corporations, then it means we would have to accept only capitalism as a valid system and fall into the TINA* (There is no alternative) ideology (a subversive linguistic remark is that “tina” in Romanian means “mud”). Again we think there is an alternative only through a collective effort to claim our labour rights in solidarity with the demands for social equality and economic justice of larger social groups such as the ones articulated by the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Indignants and so on.

OS: How have your practice and projects been received by the general public? Who are you addressing with your work?
BMR: We are addressing different audiences with our work, as every project we made was context-specific and focused on local issues. Therefore we generally address a specific audience. Our projects are oftentimes produced with the help of people from different social categories and with different professional background. We have rarely exhibited in museums, where, the public comes driven by a sort of an escapist urge to get away from daily routine and from the economic and social injustice they are faced with.
To better explain our approach we chose to illustrate this interview with a selection of our actions/performances whereby the involvement of a specific audience is made evident.

OS: The “Making Of” project at the Center for Visual Introspection in March of 2011 in collaboration with Stefan Tiron of Paradis Garaj, was a humorous, but also thorough, look at the effect of capitalism on Romanian society. What is a more sustainable and less destructive model for Romania, and why do you feel that the general population is not supporting it?
BMR: f you put it like this, then all our interventions and investigations are examining the effect (and defects) of capitalism in contemporary society. In that particular instance it was more connected to the mechanisms of the field of art itself than many of our other projects: it was part of a series of events called Making-Of, which was supposed to be a retrospective reflection of one’s own (artistic) practice. We decided to place copying and reading squarely at the center of our statement, taking into account key principles of the Bureau’s activity: collaboration, dissemination, theft, copyleft, multiplying, pirating on one hand, and research, theorizing, interdisciplinarity on the other. It was a critique of the myth of the original artist, creative, unique, built as a model for capitalism.
As for an alternative and people’s attachment to it in Romania, the general population’s support of capitalism is not as widespread as the mainstream conservative political discourse would like to prove. According to a recent very controversial opinion poll undertaken by the aforementioned IICCMER in collaboration with CSOP (Center for Studying Public Opinion and Market), 47% of the Romanians consider communism a good idea which was badly put into practice, and 63% consider having lived better before 1989, to the despair of the local anticommunist clan. And the percent seems to be rising directly proportional to the neo-liberal measures gradually imposed by the IMF and enthusiastically embraced by the local political power.

OS: Do you feel that artists and cultural workers can make a real difference through their comments and criticisms? Do you feel political art has the ability to effect change?
BMR: The “real difference” rhetoric has become too much engulfed in the advertising campaigns to have any emancipatory meaning. The “real difference” made by one or another product ultimately translates into social difference and class difference. The problem is who affords the “difference” in the first place and by which criteria. Capitalism is basically built on class difference and inbuilt divisions based on so-called “race”, age and gender. How and on which level does one challenge the hierarchies built upon “difference” and its criteria? Isn’t the “most real difference” the 99% compared to the 1%? Social inequality is growing in spite of the alleged social responsibility of the private sector. Cultural workers and artists intervene on an epistemic and aesthetic level as well as through direct action to develop and reform strategies of resistance. Just have a look at the theoreticians involved in the Occupy Wall Street Movement and generally in the recent protest movements spread worldwide. On the other hand the edges between disciplines are not so sharply defined anymore, and therefore the artist, theoretician and political activist constantly switch roles in the struggle for resistance.

OS: How do you think you will sustain your activities in the future?
BMR: We have founded together with a group of artists and theoreticians an online platform, ArtLeaks which aims at collecting proofs and giving voice to cultural workers whose labor rights have been violated. As we all know, volunteering (that is constant unpaid labor) is the main type of work artists do. In accordance to the ethical codes prescribed by suprademocratic (i.e. beyond the reach of people’s vote) institutions such as those of the EU, artists could well serve as a model for this year’s work-fashion as 2011 is the European Year of Volunteering. All the characteristics increasingly enforced on the labor market: flexibility, creativity, volunteering, uncertainty, project-oriented work (occasional work), time-based compensation are all embedded in the contemporary “bohemian” way of life. Not to mention the precarious condition of women in the context of the feminization of work brought about by the global expansion of capitalism. Women are more prone to part-time jobs because of the reproductive labor plus the care labor they have been traditionally assigned. Historically women have worked for lower wages, which from the point of view of capitalists is of course highly profitable, that’s why entire sectors of the economy have been employing mainly feminine work force – for example the pink collar workers in the data entry industry.
Having all these in mind, our position of women-artists living in Eastern Europe under the rabidly worsening economic conditions brought by the global crisis of capitalism determines our future means of subsistence. We are now in the course of completing a training program at Goethe-Institut to become German teachers. This will probably be the main way of sustaining BMR’s activities in the future. We have always had a part-time job (mainly derived from our knowledge of German) from which we financed our volunteer artistic activity. Nevertheless, we will continue our struggle against the perpetual precarization and self-exploitation to which cultural workers are subjected due to the systematic refusal of art institutions (even when supported by banks or corporations) to pay fees for this type of labor. For these, there always seems to be a better and more profitable destination for a project’s budget – to make glossy catalogues or bring together as many names as possible.

OS: You are a collective composed of three female artists: Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant and Rodica Tache. How do collaborations evolve among you, and how do you manage to set aside egos in favour of the common goal?
H: Our collaboration is based on our friendship. Friendship, as an inherent part of our lives, fulfilling needs of intimacy, trust and communication, providing an everyday support in the practical contingencies of life, constituting a continual practice of negotiation in what concerns our ideas, our difficulties, our disagreements, our inherent hierarchies, ties private life with work and agency, emotion with politics. In this sense, we consider friendship as a useful model of working and living that goes beyond private relations and becomes a political way of interacting with others.

OS: Your practice is a hybrid of cultural or social activism and art. You seem more concerned about the role art has in society and how it can be utilized to change the status quo than about the old “art for art’s sake” routine. Have you found any concrete answers to the question, “What is the use of art in a country so full of social inequalities?”
H: What is most important for us in our practice is to constantly question our position as artists, as citizens, as women, as cultural workers who are part of a system with all its contradictions and still with all its potential to produce meaningful analysis and critique. This work of continually examining one’s own role and position cannot be done outside collective practices, outside collaborative work and inter-disciplinary practice, while we try to create models for work that bring theory as close as possible to practice. We consider art to be a good method of making this sort of work possible, of creating the situations for meaningful encounters and discussions. We think art can be used as a practical way of learning, of finding self-reflexive strategies of critique and change that are the result of cooperation and sharing by people from different fields and contexts. And we think that exactly in these times in which social inequities are even more deepened by the financial crises, in times when the last traces of some sort of social solidarity are dismantled, it is important to develop the possibilities that lie in a feminist art, as model of care and responsibility.

OS: Also your practice is very concerned about actually engaging the public that you discuss in your projects. What has been their response to your work and how have they reacted to these projects? Do they recognize your projects as art or are they more interested in the social dimension? Do you feel that you have been successful in engaging them?
H: Our projects, that many times took the form of spaces for analysis and debate of social issues, which were tackled in a direct form, without too many “artistic filters”, had diverse audiences. By these projects, we wanted to bring together different voices from various fields, approaching the issues from their different perspectives and according to their experiences. In these projects we regarded art as a methodology of creating space and of hopefully finding strategies for change. We wanted to get to the raw material that could be the topic for art. We find it very important to be aware of this “raw material” (that are the social issues that were the basis for our projects) as an artist and as well as a citizen. It is not really important to us if our audience considers that what we do is art or not. What is truly important is that the audience considers that the topics we tackle are necessary and urgent, and from this point of view we think that our work was well understood most of the times.

OS: How do you sustain your practice? Are there sources of support for the work that you do?
H: Although many parts of our projects were based on our own and our colleagues’ unpaid work, we also managed to get funding for projects over the years. The process of getting funding, of writing applications, the double talk that it involves, the rhetoric of success that the relationship to the funders suppose, rhetoric that makes it difficult to have a realistic analysis of your work, the self-censorship, are aspects that are an intrinsic part of critical art production, something that we always keep in mind and try to analyze and reflect in our practice. Is there a possibility to be critical and alternative when visibility for your work is necessary in order to provoke a change and while visibility can be attained only if you have the resources? How can we prevent the fact that cultural critical projects are sometimes only vents that are sustaining the status quo, the fact that they can be sometimes only “proofs” that the system is democratic enough to sustain “plural” views, views that are condemned to remain sterile in their beautiful, intellectual clarity? We don’t have a definite answer to these questions, but we think that one of the most relevant things that can be done in a field that is many times governed by appearances and hypocrisy is to make yourself aware of the gap between your words and your actual everyday life and decisions. One of our important interests and struggles is to try to go beyond the mere theoretical field of our ideas, concepts and words and to try to enact them in our daily lives, even if this struggle many times involves failure.

OS: For me the most strident social issues in Romania are: the gravely uneven distribution of wealth which leads people to consider capitalism as a great equalizer, and the high level of religiosity ever-present in the public and private spheres, which has led to nationalism and racism. What do you feel are the most pressing problems and how are you tackling them?
H: In Romania, one of the post ’89 myths about what freedom and a good life means consisted in the idea that the capitalist system creates and guarantees democracy, that capitalism is a “natural” system whose efficiency is proved by the experience of the powerful countries of the “West.” This idealisation of the capitalist system and all the propaganda in this sense has as a palpable effect the loss of everything that was gained in the communist times as rights that a large category of people had access to (rights such as access to free education, decent housing, the right to free medical care, guaranteed pensions, etc). Of course that the uncertainty and unfairness that have become the norm in the conditions opened by the financial crisis are not new for certain categories of people, for the ones that were always precarious and marginal. Even in communist times, when officially we were all equal, people did suffer for the colour of their skin, for example, even if this suffering was not always visible. But what is new is the fact that the suffering of those who are not wealthy enough, not educated enough, not “white” enough, not healthy enough, not competitive enough, not ruthless enough is now made official. Inequality is not seen anymore as an effect of a corrupt and unfair system, but it is declared a natural state, “survival of the fittest” being the rule that we should accept as a basis of the organisation of our society. And of course that religion, as an efficient instrument of manipulation, of social division, of creation and sustaining of hierarchies, serves very well the oppressive system, as it always did in the course of history.
For us, the way of addressing these problems is the constant attempt to make them visible in our projects and to make the awareness about these problems part of a process of everyday learning and living.

OS: One of your past projects, Project Space of 2007, created within the context of Public Art Bucharest, was a physical space where discussions, meetings, and workshops were held, addressing the main issues of the social and political climate at that time. Who was your public then, and do you feel that these types of initiatives can really make a visible impact on the perceptions of members of the public?
H: If at the beginning of our activity, in the first h.arta space that we conceived in Timisoara, our public consisted mostly of students and young artists, Project Space that functioned in the frame of Spatiul Public Bucuresti/Public Art Bucharest, and also Feminisms, a project space that we had in 2008-2009 in Timisoara, had a diverse public, consisting of persons with different backgrounds, while the number of artists and art students was smaller than in the case of the first h.arta space. Part of the public of the Project Space was constituted by the ones who gave it its contents, by the ones who contributed with presentations and workshops to its programme. Because Project Space was a meeting platforms for various fields, a debate space no longer relating exclusively to the art sphere, but with art used as a set of methods to work with a more complex content, our public not only became more diverse, but also the border between who is public and who is producer of content was blurred.
It is difficult to know what was the impact of such a project, to measure its success. But we are glad that new projects and new collaborations emerged and that some of those who initiate these new projects mention Project Space as an important moment for them.

OS: We met in 2001 when I was visiting Romania to research the development of the art scene for my masters’ thesis and you were interested in doing a residency through Artslink but needed a partner organization in the States. You were managing a performance art festival in Iasi called Periferic and I was managing a multi-media arts festival called Around The Coyote in Chicago. So it worked well for the both of us. Why did Periferic turn into Vector and what was Vector intended to be?
MB: The Periferic project started in 1997 in Iasi, Romania as a performance festival which transformed into and international contemporary art biennial in 2001. In the first years of Periferic, the organizers of the festival were private persons, like myself, but as the project began to develop, it became necessary that the organizer be an institution. Therefore in 2001 Vector Association was formed, composed of individuals whose goal was to promote contemporary art in Iasi and to develop a local art scene.

OS: What is the context in which Periferic operated? What were the specific challenges of Iasi?
MB: Periferic appeared at the end of the 90s in Romania, at a time when, despite the lack of art institutions, there were quite a lot of artists developing artistic projects. In Iasi, an important university center, there was almost nothing going on in the visual arts in those first years after the fall of communism, but rather only traditional art shows. A number of the students from that time, among which I count myself, were unhappy and this was the reason that we built this other form of project, which responds to other types of expectations.

OS: How was Periferic, and later Vector, funded?
MB: In the first editions, Periferic was financed by foreign cultural institutions (Pro Helvetia, Center for Contemporary Art Soros, the French Cultural Center…). Ultimately, Vector Association applied to other granting agencies (European Cultural Foundation…) and some Romanian cultural institutions (the Ministry of Culture, the National Fund for Culture, the Romanian Cultural Center), as well as the local administration in Iasi (the City Hall). But always the foreign funds were the majority of the support we received.

OS: Who was Periferic’s, and later Vector’s, public? Do you feel that you were providing a needed service that was supported by those you intended to serve?
MB: I would divide Periferic’s public into two categories: the local public was made of students and young intellectuals. The public from outside of Iasi was represented by Romanian and international professionals from the art field (curators, artists, directors, and journalists). I think that Vector Association did a lot to develop a local art scene, but this association always functioned more as an artist-run institution, so it never succeeded, due to economic restraints and the traditional provincial mentality in Romania, to establish itself and hire professional managers and staff.

OS: What legacy do you think Periferic left?
MB: I was for a long time the director of Periferic. The last edition that I organized was in 2008 and I don’t think I’ll continue. In retrospect, Periferic put Iasi on the international contemporary art map, and helped the development of a local art scene connected to the international one. It was a project that analyzed the modes and functions that contemporary visual art can have in this type of context – that of the city of Iasi.

OS: Do you feel that the residents of Iasi can become consumers and supporters of contemporary art? If so, what needs to be done for that to happen?
MB : Yes, with the condition that even in Iasi there will be initiatives supported and funded by the local administration. Only an institution with a coherent and long-term programme that can also offer educational programs can build a local public.

OS: It is evident that relying on funds from the Romanian, but also from foreign, governments is proving to be an unsustainable model. But what is the alternative?
MB : Money from the local administration (Iasi has to pay to have contemporary culture)as well as private ones (but here there’s a danger that the organization will be a PR agent for the sponsor). I think it’s important to have institutions with independent agendas (independent of political and commercial influence).

OS: How can contemporary art activity survive and how can cultural workers make a living in contemporary art in Romania?
MB: Through continued pressure so that the institutions ion Romania (the Ministry of Culture, The National Fund for Culture, the local administration) to sustain contemporary art.

OS: The Centre for Visual Introspection is a cultural platform that undertakes projects that critically examine the relationship between art and public, art and power structures, and art and society, if put simply. CIV is an independent organization. What does independent mean in Romania? Independent from what? And how does CIV differ from other existing platforms?
AS: One of the terms used by the non-profit cultural initiative is that of independent; however, this term, which primarily draws up the line between state and/or commercial culture and that driven by organizations from civil society, is particularly reflected and appropriated by each initiative. In the case of Centre for Visual Introspection, independent refers to our ability to act as agents in the public sphere and to freely express opinions and exercise our rights. What defines us is the format. Centre for Visual Introspection is the project of the curatorial collective p+4, founded by myself together with artists Anca Benera, Arnold Estefan and Cătălin Rulea. We propose ourselves to avoid a certain type of institutional formalization characterized by the reproduction of previously checked discourses and to “risk” the adoption of a chameleon dimension, continuously adapted to the circumstances, particularities and limits of the Romanian social and cultural order. We wish to shift the role of the art institution on the Bucharest culture scene, by means of a systematic, clear and, why not, responsible discourse. The collective dimension of the centre has determined the quality of its programs which, I believe, generated a sharing space between different communities, discourses, intitiaves and people.
AB & AE: We are independent in terms of being self-funded, apolitical and non-commercial.

OS: CIV has undertaken some very ambitions and important projects, of particular interest to me are Ars Telefonica, a public art project that took place in telephone booths and also featured a series of lectures and discussions on the topic of art and the public and the theme’s many dimensions, and Self-Publishing in the Times of Freedom and Repression, an examination of the history of self-publishing through the communist regime’s censorship and the funding challenges of today. Have the projects brought about any concrete conclusions about the lack of funding for art in Romania and engaging the public? What needs to be done?
AB & AE: We don’t expect immediate concrete conclusions but aim to offer insights with long term results. “Self publishing in times of freedom and repression” discusses the new forms of censorship and freedom of speech today. We believe that samizdat publications, born in specific oppressive contexts, might shed some new light on the condition of self-publishing today, on its present forms and challenges.
AS: Projects such as Ars Telefonica or Self-Publishing in the Times of Freedom and Repression were naturally conceived in our attempt to turn CIV into a mediator between artistic and curatorial discourses and the public sphere, between various regional histories and institutional strategies. In our activity, recovery, integration and comparison are constant processes in a collective project aiming to personalize critical effort and to liberate itself from under a holistic vision of culture. Concret conclusions…? I guess we cannot talk so much about accountability when speaking about culture. Of course, there are experiences which can be fruitful for future approaches when dealing with public sphere or public funding. Transparency and civic dialogue are key-concepts in succeeding to change the public funding system and the perception on the legitimate role of art institution as a space for social action, where both actors – us, as the art scene, and them as implementers of cultural policies are in a permanent communication.

OS: What do you see as the most critical problem in Romania’s cultural realm? Where does the stagnation and inertia lie? What is keeping the system from changing?
AS: The weakness of the independent cultural scene in Romania is caused by its isolation and lack of dialogue among the several actors of the scene. Isolation is reflected by an atomized cultural production, where each initiative acts almost without any interest in collaboration or co-production. This attitude contributes to the minimal impact that this scene has upon those creators of public cultural policies.
CR: “Culture” has different levels in Romania as in so many other countries. The segment of culture in which we are active doesn’t have a “mirage” like theater does have in Romania for example, or classical music. Museum of Contemporary Art is not central, like in some other major cities in Europe. It is like contemporary art itself… at the edge of cultural life. After 20 years of “freedom” some things in culture should have been recovered, studied, archived and then advertised for educational and commercial reason. Politicians should realize once and for all that art as an innovative process it is needed and worthy for society and then maybe money will come. The most important thing that Romania and Romanians recovered in this 20 years it is orthodox religion. It is such a step back and totally opposite to contemporary art or any other form of evolutional and innovative thinking.
AB&AE: Dialogue.

OS: In the art scene, what are the power structures that inhibit implementation of a healthy structure, and what is to be done about them?
AS: You cannot blame just one side. From my perspective both the state/public and the non-governmental sector dealing with culture have its equal part in drawing a healthy cultural system. What is to be done? To see things in a pragmatic way, to manage to cooperate with local government and private sector in order to identify the priorities and necessities for the creators, the organizations within the cultural sector and to allow them to be decision-makers in designing the local cultural policies.
CR: Well, it is a long story. People and mentalities seem they can not be changed even in 20 years. Politics, business, mass media they were all ruled and implemented by former communist politicians and secret services. We are talking about newspapers, television, information, properties. And as in medieval politics education wasn’t needed, being the last on the list.
But nowadays you can see that some new generations rise and bad television, mass media in general, they are at the edge of collapse. It is not the case of CIV to be an opinion leader yet, but in this young context we have something to say. People and structures like Dan Perjovschi, Horia Roman Patapievici and ICR help a lot.
AB&AE: The Romanian art scene is active to the extent to which society needs to support contemporary art. Nevertheless both this need and the scene are extremely small. We live in parallel worlds.

OS: You have travelled quite a bit and seen many different models of functioning systems. What would you like to see Romania’s system look like? Which country serves as a model, or what elements would you like for it to have that it doesn’t now? What is CIV’s current situation and how do you see its future in Romania’s ever-changing art landscape? How are your activities supported and is it a sustainable model?
AS: I am not a person who believes in “sustainable models”. Each art context has its own particularities, behaviors and dramas. You cannot make a “copy-paste” in any of these contexts. Each model that appears is the result of the specific conditions in which art was developed and produced. And to reach to such model, means time, research and permanent self-questioning. These are the steps that we need ourselves to follow. It is not about “doing it as…” or “doing it differently”, it is about “doing it locally”.
AB & AE: We don’t like models or patterns and can’t predict the future.

OS: You opened your exhibition venue in 2009 in Craiova in the former cultural center of the Electroputere factory, which until ’89 was used to entertain the workers of the factory with various government-approved events that also functioned as tools of propaganda. Does this legacy play a role in your curatorial position? Explain your position.
CEP: This legacy should implicitly play a part in all this. Some of our projects are related to the past and even to the past of the space that houses the centre CEP; this space suggestively illustrates what has happened to Romanian culture over the last years. In fact, a significant part of the Romanian art of the last twenty years has been influenced by the past and maybe in certain regards it is still connected to it (I’m referring here to the communist past). The Romanian culture has fed on what it inherited from the past, building its discourse against a traumatic, oppressive background and succeeding in developing an authentic cultural product that has been very well received on the Western artistic markets.
We analyzed all these issues concerning the legacies of the past and the artistic discourse, discussing them in detail not only in relation to the Romanian Cultural Resolution, on the occasions of all the exhibitions organized in Leipzig and Craiova, but also as expressed in the documentary project presented at the Venice Biennial this year. On the one hand they define our curatorial position but not entirely, just for this project.

OS: Who or what do you feel played the most important role in kick-starting the development of an independent art scene? What does independent mean to you, by the way? And can organizations remain completely independent? How?
CEP: A vital part was played by the initiatives of those who realized that there were no legitimate institutions that might produce and support contemporary art and who saw themselves obligated to invent them. It could be easily noticed that many institutions, especially those belonging to the state, have remained for the most part at the fringes of mainstream culture, simulating cultural events or serving some specific interests.
You could probably call yourself independent when you are not logistically or financially conditioned. Anyway there are a lot of things that can condition the artist and this status of independence can be properly negotiated according to these conditionings.
In Romania private institutions that do not receive governmental funding enjoy this status. The biggest pressure is the financial one; since there is so little money allotted to contemporary art through governmental programmes, most independent institutions look for sponsorship abroad and when you get money from abroad, independence is negotiated on different terms, the various conditionings change their nuances.

OS: You introduced a new model of promoting Romanian artists – by bringing your exhibitions to other art centers in Europe: to Leipzig, to Venice…. How are your exhibitions received in Romania and do you have an existing public that supports you?
CEP: At the end of 2009 when we drafted the first idea of the Club and of the Romanian Cultural Resolution project, the people involved in the Romanian artistic process were very active on the international stage and less active on the national stage. That is probably what happens today and it is something normal.
The national and international public of our centre is consistent but the national public is at the beginning of its formation. Any cultural institution grows together with its public, in relation with it, because this relation engenders an exchange that produces energy and sometimes imposes some regulations on quality and content.

OS: From the outside, the Romanian art scene seems very active, interesting, and entrepreneurial. What do you think about the art scene in Romania? How do you see it?
CEP: Over the last years, initiatives have multiplied, many exhibition spaces or associations functioning in the artistic field have appeared and then disappeared but there are not too many definite and insightful positions. After all there are as many as needed or as they should be. The artistic stage here has evolved in a very organic way. The state did not offer any kind of strategy to facilitate the artistic development; there were only independent initiatives which contributed to what could be considered a possible artistic stage.
The help coming from the state and directed towards the sphere of plastic arts is very little.

OS: What would a functional and stable art system look like in Romania? Who is ultimately responsible for supporting its existence?
CEP: I don’t think that the dimensions of a national system could be that clearly defined. The relationship with other institutions and foreign artists, or the achievement of making yourself known abroad, has been and still is the most important thing for us. “System” is a big word. Generally speaking the Romanians are not too fond of systems, no matter what the nature of these systems might be, but they can easily adjust to them. The Romanian art centres or the private galleries that managed to acquire national and international success have been established and got integrated into something that already existed outside the borders of the country, they have progressively learned what has to be done in order to survive and evolve and, to support something that already existed. The responsibility belongs to all persons involved in this story, to Romanian contemporary art, to those who have contributed and still contribute to the unfolding of events in the sphere of visual arts.

OS: Many art initiatives talk about developing an alternative to the mainstream system. What do you think they are referring to? What is the mainstream system in Romania and what would the alternative to that be? Where does Club Electro Putere fit in?
CEP: Club Electro Putere is an independent space. In fact, the existing “mainstream system” is so shy that I do not think we can talk about such a difference related to contemporary art. The museums or the state institutions that produce artistic events do not compete with independent spaces. I do not think there has ever been such a competition. There is enough room for initiatives or institutions and this fact is probably not that common in Western Europe.
If we were to talk about Club Electro Putere, its evolution happened in a very short period of time and even if we did not follow a particular model but we did everything our own way, we became the only Romanian institution that has attempted an analysis of Romanian contemporary art, an analysis which has already been legitimated by a large number of artists and curators through their participation in the project.
Whether mainstream or alternative, we have managed to create our own context, we have succeeded in consolidating a basis upon which we could build in the future and which might be a point of reference for other artists if they want to create a specific vision in Romanian contemporary art…