An Infinite Map
“The Center Cannot Hold” Exhibition of Artist Patricia Moroșan
The fervor of current political discussions, preparations for elections and wars, has brought out shocking numbers and images onto screens that we no longer control. In the noise of immediate crises, it is increasingly difficult to reflect on realities that exist unnoticed, within the silence to which those often considered invisible are confined to. Patricia Moroșan’s exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte, organized at the end of last year, addresses this silence within the social, political, and poetic sphere of the world we live in, through her art and editorial project titled (I) Remember Europe.
Artist Patricia Moroșan’s photo series have the feel of a diary meant to be read, seen, and shared. Her photographic portraits are set in broader contexts, revealing a world beyond the flat surface of the paper they’re printed on, beyond the linearity of subject-lens-eye that traces the image: a snapshot in the middle of a conversation, a landscape captured in motion. The boundary between the image and the mental spaces of the people photographed progressively dissolves in an atmosphere of a long-experienced absence, reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s story Death by Landscape, whose protagonist searches her collection of landscape paintings for her childhood friend. The series (I) Remember Europe displays a continuity with the rest of Patricia Moroșan’s oeuvre At the same time, it is characterized by a quasi-documentary approach with a participatory angle. It operates within temporalities and a sense of spatiality that, on a seemingly predetermined journey in search of the center of Europe, reveal collective manifestations of nostalgia and amnesia alike, seen within frames of reference that are both historical and subjective, monumental and ephemeral.
(I) Remember Europe marks Patricia Moroșan’s first solo show in Bucharest, under the title The Center Cannot Hold. An exhibition in two parts, guided by curator Antje Ehmann, it took place between November and December 2023 at Salonul de Proiecte, with an expansion of the exhibition concept at Goethe-Institut Bucharest. If at Salonul de Proiecte the artist exhibited photos, embroidered textile installations, and a video intervention by artist Uli M. Schueppel, at Goethe-Institut there were video projections of works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Noor Abuarafeh, Cathy Lee Crane, Harun Farocki, Lamia Joreige, Rabih Mroué, Rawane Nassif, and John Smith, alongside Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan’s installation Conflict Lines. Though the idea of extending an exhibition about geographic and cultural centers into multiple spaces in the city is worth exploring alongside other such inter-exhibition collaborations, the following text will look more closely at the unusual photographic documentation that generated the artist’s search which was displayed at Salonul de Proiecte.
On a journey that starts in the artist’s city of residence, Berlin, and goes on into Eastern Europe, Patricia Moroșan identifies multiple self-declared geographical centers on the continent, in seven countries in the region. Each coordinate is marked by a monument and accompanied by discourses and geometric calculations arguing that the center is there, in Kremnica (Slovakia), Vitebsk Oblast, Polotsk (Belarus), Dilove (Ukraine), Dyleň or Tillenberg (on the German-Czech border), or Purnuškės (Lithuania), Suchowola (Poland), Mõnnuste (Estonia). The concept of the exhibition, first developed in the artist’s book with the same title as her photo series, expands within the space around a slightly off-center landmark: a canvas with cartographic geometries in which a red polygon, sewn onto an embroidered map of Europe, marks a perimeter outlined by all the centers. Around it, photographic portraits and contexts are exhibited petersburger style, on a wall of a different color, like in a grand painting salon of a lost century, with different sovereignties, combining various dimensions and contexts in affective symbolic permutations: portraits, spaces, and moments that appear to be fragments from an anonymous film.
Marta Jecu eloquently explores this almost cinematic quality of the Moroșan’s photographs , in an edifying text published in the artist book of this series. A collection of artistic testimonies further anchors the images in their technical and affective process of production: “Polotsk – Minsk (Belarus). I can’t fall asleep. I feel so melancholic that I believe everything I’m seeing speaks directly to me. And I think it might be my inner longing which makes me search for the centre in the world.”
These different centres of Europe convere in a continuum with fluid boundaries, allowing us to imagine such a map without exact coordinates, in a metafiction that replaces calculated lines with calculated geometries with different tensions embroidered broadly, manually, testimonially, ephemerally. Curator and art historian Marta Jecu compares Patricia Moroșan’s approach to Ukrainian writer Yuri Andrukhovych’s novel Twelve Circles (2005), in which the protagonist tries to reach “the heart of Europe” in 1990 without ever reaching his destination. In the exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte, the center is just as elusive. The affective center overlaps with an uncertain epicenter, crossed by waves of migration, divided by walls marking easts and wests, bombed and rebuilt, as one sees in Uli M Schueppel’s video work Im Platz (Inside The Place, 9 min-loop, 1997-2023), displayed in the exhibition as an object-installation, cut off from the rest of the space through an improvised screen made of construction materials. Within this enclave, the video work focuses one’s gaze onto places where memories and identities float, within imagined boundaries and human appropriations.
The premise of the exhibition is underlined right off the entrance, as the seven photo-documented prints are aligned on the immediate left wall. Each center-monument is located in fact at the geopolitical periphery of so-called Eastern Europe, marking a collective desire to belong, to assert one’s own importance, even if it is only a symbolic one. But whose desires are these, and which center of Europe is being sought out? At the end of the two World Wars, national boundaries were renegotiated often with the assistance of geographers and cartographers, whose arguments ranged from historical maps and strategic defense plans to sacred geometries and metaphysical fantasies. Nowadays, these borders mark power relations and military sacrifices. Most of the monuments documented by Patricia Moroșan are placed in rural areas, as the accompanying text makes clear, marking a specific index presented in longitudinal degrees and minutes. Their constitutions are abstract, sometimes containing symbols pertaining to the Euro zone, either through a direct representation of the currency or through a certain arrangement of flag stars, or, on the contrary, highlighting local symbols, sometimes resembling a memorial milestone. The final monument in the series distinguishes itself from the others through the modest wooden structure of a wayside shrine without markings. The invisibility of these supposed centers is rendered explicit by a photographic composition through which the artist places the image within a nowhere land: a center pretending to be a center pretending to be a center an x number of times becomes anonymous, lost in the stone slab of an arbitrarily determined mark.
The depictions of the monuments are treated coldly, in documentary fashion. They are silkscreen-printed, accompanied by explanatory texts on surfaces usually used in archive practices. Like a cover, the images seem to be protective witnesses to narratives that come loose from the obsessive strand of the “center of Europe.” Beyond the apparently sober image of the monuments that mark these wayward identities, Patricia Moroșan pulls on the thread of her documentary curiosity until she reaches the core of the human absences and presences behind a dual invisibility: that of people living on the peripheries of certain coordinates and that of the felt, but often unseen, presence of those who draw political and economic lines and borders.
Unlike the exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte, the aforementioned publication also contains the collective interventions of various people who agreed to photograph spaces from their respective geographic centers. The artist received the negatives by mail and developed them herself in her darkroom. A collective experience, various fragments emerge in her artist’s book, inverting a journey of documentation and exploration into a practice of associative discovery. The images collected from participants’ letters connect the artist’s book and the exhibition, infusing the selection of works with a photographic dialogue, a conversation that also takes into consideration the inside perspective of isolation and of day-to-day lives documented by the anonymous dwellers of the re-imagined centers.
As Patricia Moroșan mentions in her interview for this text, the making of her book coincides with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. The negatives here got lost in transit at a time of uncertainty and speculation about the legitimacy of the war that is difficult to comprehend with the violence of these tragic times – the page is black. Once again, the question arises: which center, which Europe? The answer attempted by the exhibition curated by Ehmann has a human dimension, through both the hopes and the disillusionments of social and economic precarity. All these spaces, all these places, become a single moment captured in this exhibition, without the need to create distinctions or imagine borders. A whole scenario emerges in which people’s lives had been flowing in elongated times of exposure, interrupted by a history that seems not to recognize them.
Seen through the calculated accident of the artistic approach, the photographs are tactile. The works preserve an intimate, personal character – they are often pictorial, if not for spontaneous moments such as the reflection of light on the lens or a fingerprint on the film. At the opposite end of the entrance to the exhibition, a clue of red yarn hangs in tension in a pseudo-textile and photographic installation around a bizarre reflection concealing the picture of a monument. The artist writes in her travel journal:
Polotsk (Belarus). It’s snowing. A movement next to the monument draws my eye. I walk the narrow path, through the snow, towards it. Two meters away, I stop, I aim my camera against the light and press the shutter button. Then I turn and walk the opposite way. It’s snowing. (…) I take another step. It’s snowing behind the light. On the opposite side of the street, Elena and Tim motion me over. And so on. Each step is the starting point for further bifurcations.
(Patricia Moroșan)
– by Cristina Stoenescu
