Dear Money, I know.

photography, 2013
comission for 'Dear Money' group show and publication
curated by Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest

With the rapacious corporate rush for Gold in Romania and beyond, we need to remember  what it all comes down to: plus-value. 

Dear Money - pink ten lei bill dedicated to the greatest Romanian painter and his brush - be good and behave, let yourself be devoured. We already know the latest scheme on art: it is the greatest commodity of all. 

Destroy Financialization. Reappropriate Gold. Save Rosia Montana.

View from the exhibition. Viennafair 9-13 October ,2013.

 Publication. Photo credits: Stefan Sava / Salonul de Proiecte

Story of the Fall #1

lecture-performance

The Ist Bezna Congress

29.06.2013

National Center for Dance, Bucharest

The Story of the Fall is a post-apocaliptic story that retells how the end came about. The Fall designates the process of the end of the world. The story is told as an event that already happened, placing the Storyteller (myself) and the audience in a near future. Performing the Story is, thus, an act of remembrance for an audience probably too young to know or remember the events.

Told in a dim, dramatic candle light, the performance incorporates two other performances: 1. illustrating the Practice of the Now-Fall (see images below with Now-Fall Training - NFT illustrations) and 2. illlustrating the practice of the ReRaProp (Retro-Radical-Prophecy).

The Practice of the Now-Fall consists of various exercises on how to fall without getting hurt (see illustrations below) while the ReRaProp practice consists in anonimously performing a text considered to be a Retro-Radical-Prophecy, meaning texts that preceed the Fall and anticipate it considerably. In this perfromance the text used is the „Introduction” by Jean-Paul Sartre to the Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon. The perfomance of the text is interrupted by a reading from Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.

The Story of the Fall is primarily an exercise in political imagination. The powerfull feeling of no-way-out is an important factor in maintaing the status quo of intersectional systems of opression. Constant political imagining is crucial to destabilizing the field of representation. The idea of apocalypse is a radical esthetical vision and can be used as a tool for radical political resubjectification. The Story of the Fall is an attempt to build such a context of transformation and help pave the way for an important twist in collective representation: linking local and regional (Romanian and Eastern European) conditions with the context of the global south via postcolonial and decolonial concepts. In a way, the Story of the Fall can be viewed as a complex fiction to trigger identification (of the audience) with the ideas of Franz Fanon. It also brings into question racism and anti-racism, a very important issue in the Romanian context by questioning what could be the roles of people like myself (Eastern European „white”) in the anti-racist struggle.

>>> Excerpt from the Story.

„(…)

It soon became very obvious to many that the Apocalypse culture developed by the entartainment industry was nothing more than one of capitalism's typical strategies ment to anticipate and incorporate. At first, some were still excited about it, but soon people got massively disenchanted. What were supposed to be scarry, dramatic movies – thrillers as they called them – were massively making people laugh until they cried. It just looked like a poor imitation of the real. A poor expression of a great collective fantasy. It became clear that what was happening was something far from the reach of Hollywood.

(...) It merely passed several years, when the idea of the Fall appeared. Sprung from the people concentrated on developing a praxis, the Fall strategically contained all of the great components of the Slogan. The Fall is neither an ideology, nor a belief. It is merely a vision. It was this indefinite character of the Fall that made it able to resist cooptation. Of course, it took a lot of time and a lot of blows that had to be diverted but in the end, it worked. Even in its most difficult moments there where at least a hundred thousand people practicing it on a daily basis.

The idea was that for the Apocalypse as an-end-to-the-world-as-we-know-it to happen, all of the great man-made systems had to fall. To Fail – Brake – Collapse – Bankrupt – Crash – Ruin. All of these processes were contained in the idea of the Full-Fall. (...) Taken these into account, the idea of the Now-Fall prepared people for the loss of everything as they knew it. Fear had to become a familiar feeling, however still negative. Fear was supossed not to be enjoyed but rather become a necessary tool in the Great Process of the Full-Fall. Once the Full-Fall is achieved, the Fear had to continue to be a tool for keeping tranformation in a flow. (...)

The fear of losing the world as you know it is very similar with the fear felt when the body is in danger of injuries. This simple observation led to the creation of the Now-Fall Training system. Referred to as NFT, this system enabled people that practiced it, to prepare for the Full-Fall. The NFT consisted of multiple types of fall exercises adapted for a variety of people. According to age, health state, habitual gear etc., one could practice the fall of one's own body regularly. In the process of training, one would achieve several abilities necessary for the Full-Fall process: stop avoiding fear of losing everything, enact one or several action(s) that risk who you are in the world, survive losing everything, change one's own subjectivity after the Fall. (...)”

>>> Drawing from the NFT #4.

 

>>> See full handbook below.

Bezna #4 & Ist Bezna Congress

Bezna #4 is out!

READ IT!

the Ist Bezna Congress. 

a series of lecture-performances on/from the Netherworld
Saturday, 29 Jun, 22h00, CNDB Bucharest

The Second Body and The Multiple Outside - Alina Popa As long as we are caught in the present available body, there is indeed no outside. The problem is not that there is no outside, but it lies precisely in the fact that we are caught in the same outside without working with it. There are multiple outsides to be produced. Even an outside devoid of human and without thought.

Shadow Body (Second Body) - Florin Flueras Shadow Body is a concept but it can be also a concrete unvisual, ungrounded, unknown body, a second nature or even the body that flies in your dreams. Shadow Body is not so much about what exists or what is possible, or about what you can comprehend or validate, Shadow Body is not a body that you have, it is rather a body that has you, it is a concept through which the unknown can abduct you.

The Story of the Fall - Veda Popovici "Generally a relaxed body results in fewer injuries in falls." excerpt from the FFI (Full Fall Instructions). We welcome all to the lecture of the Story of the Fall. This story, told today, after it happened, counts as an act of remembrance and re-learning the New Fear. Springing out of the hybridization of banal darkness with exceptional darkness, it is this New Fear the emotion to trigger the Full Fall.

The pleasure of nibbling in case of afterlife emergency - Mihai Lukacs + Arnold Șlahter "At this point, there's no really authentic way for us to say who or what to look for and guard yourself against. Reaction of law enforcement officials is one of complete bewilderment at this hour. Do not venture outside for any reason until the nature of this crisis has been determined, and until we can advise what course of action to take. The safest course of action at this time is simply to stay where you are. So far, the best advice they are able to give the public is this: "Tell the people for God's sake to get off the streets! Tell them to go home and lock their windows and doors up tight!" (George A. Romero)

Black Lol - Iuliana Stoianescu A blonde was sitting on a couch in front of the TV, when suddenly she hears knocking at the door. She goes to the door and askes: “Who is it?” “Me!” “Me?!?” :))))

The Outernational Condition - Ion Dumitrescu For someone in front of the Iron Curtain (looking over the fresh ruins of the wall) the east seemed an unmolded territory with resilient subjects living in geo-political dim light, humanoid silhouettes agitating in obscurity, apparently not fully developed, too weird to live too rare to die, craving to break in the international habitus. They appeared incomprehensible and unevolved on too many levels. It was only later that these outer-subjects were tamed and transformed in voracious consumers.

Microbification and the Politics of Noise - Irina Gheorghe In the utopian construction of a new world, the borders with the already existing one is clearly marked and fortified. Under the terror of invasions, infiltrations, infections, autonomy and immunity seem to be the only alternative promises. But when interior and exterior are already contaminated by one another separation becomes impossible and resistance annihilates itself.

Centrul de Calcul Bucuresti - Ștefan Tiron + Claudiu Cobilanschi (side event, Wednesday, 26 Jun, 11h00, guided tour in the Museum of Politehnica University, Bucharest). Centrul de Calcul is interested in obsolete forms of knowledge, in retro-futurisms, in the bulky, outrageous and unwarranted nationalistic craze about inventors but also the accidental rediscovery of naive savoire faire that, to us at least, is in need of radical reappraisal.

In the Name of the Father. An anti-prayer

performance/drawing

6-9.06.2013

kvir feminist actziya Vienna

In the name of the father is an impossible physical performance in which the body of a woman confronts the oppressed position which she occupies through self-violence. By violently enacting the specificity of a womanly body, this body (my own) speaks to „the father”, an entity encapsulating multiple oppressive entities: the father – head of mononuclear, heterosexual family; god – head of christian religion; capital; empire – as the geo-system of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

The performance initially proposes a seemly submissive posture – on knees, head covered – performing an equally submissive ritual – a prayer only to try and appropriate them in an emancipatory dimension. The anti-prayer is a ritual of revolt and killing, of empowerment and rejection. Not a curse, the anti-prayer is a painful ritual in front of an icon representing the ideal physical expression of the performer. The performance ultimately addresses some key radical feminist debates: emancipation through violence, essentialism and culture-based identity, cisidentity and queer. Also it opens the question of the intersectionality of the oppressive structures sketched above from the character of „the Father”.

 >>> Fragment from the text:                                                                                                                                                                        >>> The icon, drawing.

„In the name of the Father.

In the name of the Father.

In the name of the Father.

I look for You, I dig You out.

How much pleasure can we afford?

A maximal and total pleasure that annuls me

A woman turned upside down.

Self-Canibalization.

Darkness.

How much light can you afford when the light is not yours? It is someone else's.

The thick fingers are not enough, the long arm not even, your whole body: 

sink it back and it won't be enough.

The whole world remains to be devoured. A destructive desire.

A hand. And with the other I'm making a cross.

In the name of the Father.In the name of the State.

In the name of the Empire.

In the name of Capital.

In the name of You, Masters, I clog myself.

I silence myself. Cover myself. Blind myself.

In your name I turn my refused gaze in myself.

The lacking Rib? But I am Lack itself.

(...)”

The Wretched in the Sand

performance/video documentation/photography

Inter-format symposium:

On Hosting and Displacing: Critical tourism, site-specificity and post romantic condition

Nida Art colony, Lithuania

16-19 May, 2013

In 1961, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth is published in France with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. The event, by way of publicizing one of the great works of anti-colonial literature, affirmed (once more) the necessity and urgency of anticolonial and decolonial struggle in Europe. Sartre’s contribution, a Western voice confronted with the urgency of the anticolonial project, is a landmark for the history of the White, Western position in the anti- and de-colonial struggles.

Four years later, Jean-Paul Sartre together with Simone de Beauvoir travel to Nida. A famous picture depicts a dark-clothed lonely white man, walking on sand dunes effortfully in the strong wind. The sand dunes could be anywhere, but necessarily evoke a margin of a mental or physical empire. Not just a tourist, Sartre is there as a Western leftist intellectual taking a trip to the land of the new other, the East, the Soviet empire, communism.

the wretched in the sand merges the two historical events into a lecture-performance. Starting with an interpreted reading of the preface we continue with a workshop by engaging participants to discuss the performance. Myself, I am coming from a certain East, from the post-communist context of Bucharest, Romania. The performance explores what is at stake when such a performer, a woman, an Easterner, a post-communist reenacts Sartre’s anti-colonial writing in a remote location he once visited.

Sand, Algeria, the West, Europe, margin, communist, empire, tourism are critically used to redefine our (myself and the participants) positions. Questions such as: What is North, South, West and East? Who is the Wretched? How Western/European do the participants/public feel? And what is this Europeanism: guilt, shame, pride, desire? will be put forth in the workshop.

>>> The Wretched in the Sand. Nida dunes panorama.

>>> Excerpt from Jean-Paul Sartre’s preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”.

(…) You know well enough that we are exploiters. You know too that we have laid hands on first the gold and metals, then the petroleum of the ‘new continents’, and that we have brought them back to the old countries. This was not without excellent results, as witness our palaces, our cathedrals and our great industrial cities; and then when there was the threat of a slump, the colonial markets were there to soften the blow or to divert it. Crammed with riches, Europe accorded the human status de jure to its inhabitants.

(...)A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator found only this to say in defence of the West: ‘We aren’t angels. But we, at least, feel some remorse.’ What a confession! Formerly our continent was buoyed up by other means: the Parthenon, Chartres, the Rights of Man or the swastika. Now we know what these are worth; and the only chance of our being saved from, shipwreck is the very Christian sentiment of guilt. You can see it’s the end; Europe is springing leaks everywhere. What then has happened? It simply is that in the past we made history and now it is being made of us. The ratio of forces has been inverted; decolonization has begun; all that our hired soldiers can do is to delay its completion. (…)”

                                         

                               Read full text here.

>>> Captions from „The Wretched in the Sand” performance, video, 18 min.

So You Think You’re Political ?! Seven Notes on the Harmlessness of Art

original text
ArtLeaks Gazette, #1.
2013

(...)
#6 Art and legality (2)
From a legal point of view, there is an important distinction between radical politics/direct action and art. In the contemporary Western legal systems, art is seen as a fundamental right. There is therefore a tendency to tolerate, legalize and defend something that is considered art. Enacted radical politics are always directed towards forms of governmentality, and the most cohesive expression of this governmentality is the law. Take the form of revolution as the privileged form of enacted radical politics: it is fundamentally illegal. It is this definite distinction between the tendency of legalizing art and illegalizing radical politics that is at the core of the configuration of the harmlessness of art.

Read full text here.