[oberlist] HR* evnt/smnr: Institutional Affects in a Romanian Docu-Noir at Micropolitics++4.11.2011++DAZ, Zagreb

[The Bureau of Melodramatic Research]

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.


lecture
Friday, 4 November at 7 pm
DAZ, Trg bana J.Jelačića 1/3, Zagreb


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.

organized by [BLOK] Zagreb www.blok.hr curator Vesna Vukovic
project website under construction, for the previous events please  
check www.mikropolitike.org



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