The Transmutation of Common Places
The photographic and post-photographic practices that led to the development (actually, the rephrasing) of artistic research after the 2010s seem to have become banal. Yet one can still see a recuperative interest in documentary, critical, and social investigation that starts from the visual and discursive research into topics that are uncomfortable for the ideologues of a certain hedonism specific to conservatives committed to preserving the standards of late capitalism, and interest which constructs, frame by frame, an evocative narrative specific to an aesthetics of refusal. What is also interesting then is the (re)location (a reconceptualizing of the periphery) of such an aesthetics, standing in a critical relation to the passion with which central places close themselves off within their own gaze directed at themselves, a sort of selfie-centrism.
For tactical reasons, part of my refusal to look towards and from the center, I will discuss here a case study that is part of a series of art projects that develop a suite of situational research topics that are then communicated through exhibitions and (art/artists’) books which are also interested in exemplifying certain ways of theorizing art actions. Such a project took place early in the summer of 2022 as part of a partnership between the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iași (the departments of Photo-Video-Computer Image Processing and Art Theory and History), Escola D’Art i Superior de Disseny Illes Balears from Palma de Mallorca, and the Center for Contemporary Photography in Iași, a project curated by Lavinia German, Silvia Prió and Cătălin Soreanu with photo works by young Spanish and Romanian artists: Sandra Calpe Micó, Maria Antònia Grimalt Torres, Natasha Lebedeva, Cătălin Marinescu, Laura Martinez, Sarah Daria Muscalu, Radu Neacșu, Oana Nechifor, Lluc Pallicer, and Ioan Gabriel Popa, with texts by Lavinia German, Cristian & Oana Maria Nae, Silvia Prió, Maria del Pilar Rovira Serrano, and Cătălin Soreanu.
Titled Common Places,[1] the photography book that came out of this partnership showcases the works of ten young artists, of which five are in bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD programs at the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design in Iași. Their works were supervised by professors Matei Bejenaru and Lavinia German.
In one of the case studies, in the photo series vita migrantis, Oana Nechifor artistically documents how the lives of a group of Romanian migrants changed as they went to work in western Europe for economic reasons, going through the perplexing experience of wondering whether life could really be “better” there. Beyond the troubling statistics, which show that over four million Romanians have immigrated in recent years, Oana Nechifor’s series of photos invites us to a collateral contemplation of migrants’ everyday life and of the emotional impact of alienation or adapting to life in various western societies. Oana Nechifor’s autobiography (her parents and relatives had immigrated to Spain) was the context of her artistic research, which focused on putting simple moments of everyday life out of sequence, in counterpoint with contemplations of being torn away from your horizon, on how the freedom of an intimate detachment is denied. In her photographic research, Oana Nechifor mentions that she uses the language of the photo essay in her observational and empathizing work, combining the rhetoric of photo-journalism with the discourse of sociological case studies. She has already produced three photography books, each visually telling the story of Romanian families that have immigrated to Germany, Spain, and Great Britain, refusing programmed precarity and exclusion from opportunities.
In another socio-visual research project, Cătălin Marinescu photographs the place where the world of things explodes into the horizon of the senses, releasing into the air the most contradictory of impossibilities: from radios and ties to crutches and landaus, or from phones and sports shoes to bicycle wheels and wooden elephants. The world of the Iași flea market, captured in the series Memories Fair, is staged from the perspective of the camera capturing the unrealistic and unacceptable. The photographer memorizes a seemingly endangered world, which speaks so directly about our need to learn about the details of the past, about the practice of the old ecology of economic trade, or the somewhat ritualistic refusal of renewal at any cost.
In connection to the threat of extinction of a world of objects and habits from the good old days, we can also see the disappearance of the industrial world with different eyes. The history of the extinction of the industrial facilities from the Socialist period in Iași is captured in Sarah Muscalu’s post-media project Industrial Zone. Here, archive photos of famous factories in Iași which were later demolished and replaced with supermarkets belonging to private multinationals are, visually and sentimentally, associated with photographs of the new buildings with new functions and with the somewhat commemorative objecthood of sheets of old, yellowed paper, on which the artist has written short histories of the old factories (processing meat, bread, beer, and textiles), for which she used a typewriter recovered from an employee of the former Țesătura factory who used to type up the industrial activity reports.
On the other hand, the atmosphere of post-industrial spaces at night, captured in Ioan Gabriel Popa’s photo series A Lost Dream. Nocturnal Study of Post-Industrial Spaces, transposes into metaphor the feeling of loss, of disappearance behind the curtain of darkness, of the scale of abandonment and the depth of oblivion. In a clean and minimalist photographic space, illuminated by beams of artificial urban light, fragments of decay and abandonment are captured in a contradictory relationship with the new buildings erected in the same spots. These places in which workers once labored, in extensive industrial facilities, have gradually been replaced, in the new socio-economic regime, with technologies that require only minimal monitoring, generating profits that create only restricted benefits for private use. On the spot of other such places, commercial or entertainment spaces were built, providing products and services that are mostly imported.
In a relationship of cultural contradiction with the ethos of replacement by augmenting the illusion of renewal, the photo series Dandelion Voice, created by Radu Neacșu, documents a small ethnographic museum spontaneously set up by an old woman in her own home, incidentally in Satu Nou in Vaslui county, where the artist is from. Radu Neacșu recounts his conversations with the old lady, Mrs. Lucreția, 81, and the time he spent photographing the details of the rural world and way of life (pieces of folk costumes, household objects, tools) and portraits of cohabitation. This delocalization of the photographer from the space of urban life, in his wish to recall the naturalness of a return, even one in time, can be seen as an inflection of his refusal to accept a potential estrangement.
All these artistic research projects in the field of photographic and post-media art reconsider, in their interpretative potentialities, the exchange value of the common place and shape a series of motifs justifying the employment of an aesthetic experience of refusal, a refusal to accept certain twists of fate or destructions of meaning.
– by Cătălin Gheorghe
[1] The publication Lugares comunes / Locuri comune / Common places, Centrul de Fotografie Contemporană, Iași, 2022, ISBN 978-973-0-36321-0, was co-financed by the European Union’s Erasmus+ program.
