Migrant's Monument - to be erected

public intervention, installation, debate

Salonul de Proiecte

July 2014

English translation of text on the plaque:

HERE SHALL BE ERECTED SOON

THE MIGRANT'S MONUMENT

DEDICATED TO ALL THOSE 

WHO HAVE CROSSED BORDERS

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL.

IN THEIR HONOR, TO THOSE

WHO HAVE TRAVELLED, WORKED,

LOVED AND SUFFERED FAR

FROM HOME AND THEIR LOVED ONES.

Migrant's Monument, plaque, faux marble (gypsum), 90x72cm, 2014

Are there any more difficult to cross borders for Romanian citizens? The distant West seems to say that no, not now when the privilege to be part of the exclusive club of Europe has been de jure given to this population. Granting a considerable transborder mobility comes though with a price: the duty to contribute at the consolidation of the fortress Europe. The borders that shelter the so-called values of civilization stretch today to Romania and must be defended in the face of the eternal barbarian hordes.

Europe's imposed request by is not just a condition or a paternalist remark. It is an attempt to erase the recent memory of the suffering endured by those here, of all the humiliations of Romanian citizens of not being Christian, white or civilized enough. And to negate the continuation of these injustices today. The Migrant's Monument is the never realized promise of the celebration of this memory. Because the suffering, the humiliation but also the resistance and solidarity continue in the migrant context, as long as there will be national and international borders.

People of various ethnic backgrounds who circulate Europe and the world more easily than others because they posses Romanian citizenship, part of the EU, could have more in common with those coming from Cameroon, Vietnam, Syria or Peru. Difference and similarity do not reside in ethnic origin but in the role prescribed by the labor apparatus of the construction of the "European civilization". For all of the populations of these countries these are especially those of the caretaker, maid, the cook, builder and driver, waiter and babysitter. And, like these, Eastern Europe has not disappeared after 1989 but simply put in a place of invisibility.

The Migrant's Monument is an intervention in the field of the representation of national identities situated in the transformative context of migration. Seen as a solidarity message, the plaque carries both the impossibility of remembrance and honor by local authorities and the hope for collective dignity.

The figure of the foreigner (stranger) is central both to European identity and to national identities within the EU. Romanian citizens constitute for years a special category of foreigners for Western eyes: never sufficiently European, civilized or white. This representation is applied, although in a different measure to persons outside of European space that manage to arrive in Western Europe. Romania public space has taken up this representation, putting an apparent distance between the foreigner from Romania in the West and the non-European foreigner in Romania. But the two conditions are much more alike than apart.

This project seeks to explore such representations and the possibilities of transforming them with the aim of transborder solidarities.

In support of the Freedom March 2014!

Migrant's Monument consists out of three main elements:

1. The plaque, exhibited initially in the exhibition space and then installed at the Rahova International Bus Station on 11.06 (see below);

2. A reader containing a research on the representations of Romanian migrants in Western Europe, non-European migrants in Western Europe and non-European migrants in Romani;

3. A public debate: "Strangers across the borders and strangers within the borders", with Bashar Al-Kishawi, Simina Guga, Veda Popovici, David Schwartz on 22.06, Salonul de Proiecte.

Inauguration of the plaque announcing the monument
Rahova International Bus Station, 11.06.2014
photo credits: Stefan Sava.

View of the installation in the bus station.

(Collective) Dignity and (the Rhetorics of) Belonging.

 A fragmented history of the production of national identity in arts and the cultural realm in Romania from the 70s up to now.

theory course at National University of Arts, Bucharest
academic year 2014-2015, MA level

Poster for the course, inspired by Revolutionary Romania (right) by C.D. Rosenthal (1848)

The strive for dignity and the need for belonging are arguably the most important elements that nationalism promises to satisfy, making them chief drives to be reclaimed for a more emancipatory politics. Nowadays, while nationalisms regain collective affects and reshape contemporary subjectivity all around the world, it has become a pressing issue to critically position oneself and start writing back the idea of the nation. 

Dignity and Belonging is precisely an intervention in this field of subjectivity production. It is however an intervention, which both theoretically and methodologically opposes any essentialism of the nation. In other words, in my approach I tend to regard nation and nationalism as continuous processes, as permanently re-enacted strategies within a tactical field of power, rather than as fixed or static identities.    

The course is based on the analysis of artists, artworks, exhibitions, art institutions as well as other cultural objects that have modulated the discourse on the nation in the Romanian context from the 70s nationalist shift of the Ceausescu regime until today. It also focuses on analyzing the hegemonic elements within the westernising effort of the local artistic canon in the given time-span in the context of recent exhibition projects about contemporary Eastern European art. Drawing from the work of de- and post-colonial scholars such as Mignolo, Balibar, Bhabba to nationalism studies personalities such as Anderson, Chatterjee and Verdery, the analytical framework is ascribed to the context of regional (Eastern European) and local (Romanian) collective identity representations. The invention of tradition, the East/West dichotomy, the function of the idea of Eastern Europe, the relation between the nation-state and global capital, the desire for and aura of the West or the potential of hibridity and a transnational horizon are just some of the reflections that will be developed in the course. 

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.

the Blind Museum presents: Future Exhibition Preview.

Future Exhibition Preview

part of the Open for Inventory collective project, Platforma Contemporary Art Space, October 2012.Participants: Marina Albu, Emil Avasilichioaiei&Sabin Gârea, Ștefan Bandalac, Raluca Croitoru, Larisa David, Marian Dumitru, Ileana Faur, Cosmina Ivanov, Iulia Mocanu, Veda Popovici/muzeul orb, Diana Ursan.  
Facilitator: Simona Dumitriu
The project consisted of the exploration of the collection of Romanian art of the National Museum of Contemporary Art by a group of artists that eventually developed works/interventions/concepts starting from the material found in the deposit. As a result, a number of artworks from the 70s and 80s were taken out of the deposit and exhibited.

The Blind Museum's intervention in the collection was to select works pertaining to the nationalist tendency of the 70's and 80's and to exhibit them facing the wall, in what seems to be an exhibition that is just about to be mounted. The "Future Exhibition" is a glimpse into a not-so-improbable future where nationalism is again in the institutional spotlight.

Each artwork awaits to be hung on a nail hammered in the wall just above it.

Details: "Vasile Pop N., Hommage to the Great Unification, 1983" (left) and "Patriotic composition" (right).

On the back of each artwork there is the title. The audience is left to imagine how the artworks actually look by reading the titles, and thus participating in their actualization.