From Ruin of the Past to the Horizon of Expectations
Daria Nedelcu
In times of deep crisis, acts of critique and expressions of hope for better worlds find their place in the works of artists. The present unsatisfactory conditions are illuminated and a tension between what is and what could be arises. In recent years, the itineraries to possible other futures have taken on a complex configuration. The past becomes a ”detour” and a repository of general difference and particular non-capitalistic practices while contemporary artists engage with it on a prospective nostalgic stance.
A body of artists living in Romania, most of them debuting against the backdrop of the postcommunist transition, depict, narrate and stage past utopias in their artworks as a conflicting presence. Born before and after the communist regimes in Romania and Germany collapsed Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu (1991), Irina Botea (1970), Mona Vatamanu (1968) and Florin Tudor (1974) Vlad Nanca (1979) and Kristin Wenzel (1983) engage in thought-provoking ways with the communist utopia. Installations and videos, objects and photographs showcase acts of gazing back together with radical texts that look forward and attempts to survey the physical remains and ruins of a utopia declared dead to identify what is still alive.
The thesis will tackle how the contemporary artists active in Romania deal with the communist utopia and will pose questions about their biographies and tactics, their focus on particular aspects, and the use of certain mediums. Assuming the hypothesis that the revisitation of the recent past extends in a subtle or direct critique of the capitalist system and its self-proclaimed universality, the ways the artists work with the communist utopia will be examined through the utopian impulse concept. Coined by the philosopher Richard Noble as a tension between a sociopolitical critique and a radical alternative implied by that critique, the notion will gain additional semantic layers, as it metamorphosizes in the artworks surveyed.
When using the term utopian impulse for these artworks, the following aspects are presupposed: the notion concerns the critique of the malign aspects of the neoliberal system and its effects on the life of (non)humans that is represented in the oeuvre of the artists. However, this critique entails also an expression of hope for a better world. The notion also addresses the drive towards going back to the recent/distant past to recover elements that are missing in the present, but are necessary in imagining and hoping for other modalities of experiencing the present (hope, desire, optimism).