The Turbulence of Change, The Shock of the New
Latitudes | Humanscapes, part of the official bid for the European Capital of Culture 2021, opened to the public on September 1, 2016 at the Kanellopoulos Cultural Centre in Eleusis, Attica, Greece and will run through November 15.
The exhibition surveys aspects of post-communist life in the Romania of today through the photography and videos of seven international contemporary artists considering all socio-political and economic events that the nation experienced during the last five decades.
Romania's last five decades of turbulent history gradually immersed into a narrative of diverse multidimensional realities. Embarking from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s vision to advance the then Socialist Republic of Romania (inherited from Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, 1947-65) towards a post-Soviet and hybrid-communist terrain infused with carefully filtered Western influences and heavily reinforced by extreme personal ambition, the country was inevitably led towards an irreversible situation of dystopia, economic decadence and social hardship.
Ceaușescu’s and his wife Elena's rule of twenty five years (1965-1989) drastically changed not only the nation's socio-political mapping but also its economical and cultural infrastructure. The undertaking of mass scale projects involving the proliferation of heavy industries and factory construction in both urban and rural habitats all over the country, engaged a large portion of the population. Industrial insertions had a profound impact on demographic levels dramatically reshaping the distribution of Romania's population. The emergence of vast industrial areas, mining sites and oil-refinery plants as well as the introduction of new collective housing to concentrate farmers and their families – the future factory workers – altered rural landscape as never before.
The subsequent governments that came into force after the fall of Ceaușescu found a traumatised country at the brink of collapse battling with severe social injustices. Poverty and the long-term socio-cultural overrides instrumentalised by the dictators’ regime and control were so deeply rooted that it was almost impossible for any change to take effect in the following decades. Corruption combined with bad politics and diplomacy continued torturing the nation and left the country in a vulnerable situation. The transition from a centrally planned economy to a fully functioning free market economy and the attempts to westernise and capitalise Romania often proved to be a major challenge. Only recent changes in the political scene triggered by events of social unrest brought the country's economy on a development path with international economical rankings indicating progress and gradual success for the first time.
Latitudes | Humanscapes brings together the body of work of a group of seven artists, photographers and cinematographers, who were either born in Romania (Ioana Cirlig, Petrut Calinescu, Andrei Nacu) or moved to Romania from overseas (Michele Bressan, Davin Elicsson, Carlo Gianferro, David Leventi). They were all born in the 1970s or early 1980s. Those who grew up in Romania witnessed totalitarianism during their childhood years and experienced its aftermath as teenagers and adults. Those who moved to Romania later on in their life were acquainted with the country’s past via the post-communist present along with the post-industrial and societal detritus that they encountered as newcomers.
With time as the protagonist of the story, all seven artists deal with notions of bygone stereotypes, traces of melancholia trapped within the vision of hope that things will change nevertheless taking them so long before they partially did and simultaneously transmitting echoes of creation and de-creation of the nation’s past, present and future. The images on view negotiate recurrent themes of cultural identity traversing across smaller or larger social entities in both remote and urban districts, within private and public domains.
The exhibition poses questions on the frailty and diversity of human existence. However, above all, it attempts through the traits and heterogeneity of the nation’s character, nonmaterial vernacular culture, values of traditions and authenticity of folklore identity to enunciate and celebrate the will of power for survival, never abandoning hope and never giving up life regardless the good or bad news that it has in store for us.
Dr. Kostas Prapoglou is an archaeologist-architect, contemporary art writer, critic and curator based in London, UK and Athens, Greece.
Image Credit: David Leventi
