h.arta group

2010-08-19T23:17:00.002-07:00

We have moved!

Here:

www.hartagroup.ro

2010-06-07T06:07:00.000-07:00

The most beautiful day of my life

work published as insert in IDEA arts+society # 33-34

please click on the images to enlarge them in order to read the texts

2010-05-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

Inspired by life. A Timisoara- Berlin- Warsaw- Bucharest clothing collection

The cloths that are part of the Inspired by life. Timisoara-Berlin-Warsaw-Bucharest clothing collection are created, transformed and re-used starting from what is around us, in our everyday environment. We think of our environment, of the objects we come across, of the people we want to identify with, of our bodies in their most physical aspects, of the ways in which fashion and concepts of beauty are influencing us, etc in order to transform clothes into vehicles for ideas. By transforming clothing, the practical, everyday objects into concepts (reflecting the interactions we experience, the discussions we have, the texts we read, the ideas we exchange) and then transforming these concepts into practical, familiar, everyday objects – cloths – back again, we intend to realise once again that dichotomies between body and mind, “high” (art) concepts and everyday life, theory and practice need to be constantly demolished.

We use different practical methods to make visible the narratives that are informing the cloths and the raw materials that we use are of varied and multiple nature. We could mention here the actual physical objects such as clothing items that we transform or fabrics that we use to make new cloths. We could also mention actual events, facts, encounters and discussions that triggered the motivation for a certain piece and that informed its concept and its design. We could mention as well the theoretical texts (present in the collection in the form of the several quotations that we use) texts that are important for us in the understanding of our situation as persons, as women, as artists, as members of the society. These are texts that are exposing our present situation in the times of global capitalism as times when life has no value in relation to capital and texts that envision possibilities of resistance and of reclaiming life.

Inspired by life, although names itself a “collection” will not follow a certain formal line such as common compositional elements for the pieces, or a certain type of fabric, a certain colour scheme etc. that would give the different pieces a feeling of formal unity. Each piece that we do for the collection follows its own story, and we move from one piece to another, according to the ideas that we want them to become the bearers of. Some cloths are carrying quotations that are a direct reaction or response to the origin or “story” of that particular item that we are using or transforming. Other pieces are using the clothing as a somewhat neutral surface on which carbon copied images of our (already mediated) reality are exposed as constructed and are connected to quotations that are exposing and explaining the artificialness of the things depicted in this images even further (things taken for granted such as the “naturalness” of gender, for example, or the “normal” disconnectedness between the women working in a sweatshop and the women who get to wear the cloths). Other pieces have on them parts kept together by zippers, parts with texts of protest and revolt, in a society in which the possibilities of revolt are more and more normalised, limited, absorbed and policed, and in which protest, in order to be possible, often has to take the subtle forms of the quotidian. In this sense, the zippers are holding together different fragments of texts explaining different aspects of a multifaceted reality. Some pieces already took a form or we already know how to make them, some pieces will maybe remain only sketches and plans.

Priveste-ma asa cum sunt. Cuvinte si imagini ale femeilor rome
Dikh man kadă sar sem. Lava aj dikimata le rromnenqe
See me as I am. Words and images of Roma women

Introducere

Priveşte-mă aşa cum sunt. Cuvinte şi imagini al femeilor rome

Peste tot în Europa, majoritatea romilor trăiesc sub limita sărăciei, cu un acces scăzut la educaţie şi la piaţa muncii, în condiţii care determină ca speranţa lor de viaţă să fie mult scăzuta faţă de cea a majoritarilor, în condiţii care anihilează stima lor de sine şi care îi determină să-şi reprime sentimentul propriei lor identităţi.

Ca membre ale unei etnii care a fost oprimată timp de secole şi care continuă să fie marginalizată, situaţia femeilor rome este cu atât mai dificilă, acestea aflându-se la intersecţia a multiple discriminări: de etnie, de gen, de clasă socială. Majoritatea femeilor rome îşi trăiesc viaţa între aceste coordonate, prinse între discriminările societăţii majoritare (care le priveşte ca fiind parte dintr-o etnie „nedemnă”, „periculoasă”, „primitivă”, etc.), între discriminările unei societăţi organizate patriarhal (care menţine femeile într-o stare de marginalitate şi tăcere, punând asupra lor povara muncilor socotite exclusiv „feminine” şi povara unor norme şi prescripţii inerente „feminităţii”) şi între discriminările unei societăţi axate pe individualism, proprietate şi consum (care are nevoie pentru reproducerea capitalului ca anumite categorii de persoane sa fie menţinute într-o stare de continuă izolare şi sărăcie). Femeile rome sărace trăiesc într-o lume în care discriminarea, excluderea şi marginalizarea par a fi un destin de neevitat, perpetuat de generaţii, în condiţiile în care ele îşi asumă în exclusivitate responsabilităţile pentru muncile casnice şi de îngrijire, au un acces precar la sistemul de sănătate şi de educaţie, suferă violenţe fizice şi verbale din cauza genului şi etniei lor, trăiesc adeseori în adăposturi improvizate, cu veşnica teamă a evacuării de către autorităţi sau a incendierii de către grupuri extremiste, în condiţiile în care majoritatea muncilor la care femeile rome au acces sunt cele refuzate de populaţia majoritară – muncile dificile şi socotite degradante -, în care reproducerea lor este considerată „periculoasă” pentru „puritatea” naţiunii, în condiţiile în care ele asistă la felul în care copiii lor trăiesc aceleaşi discriminări ca şi ele, în ciuda discursurilor neoliberale care promit o aparentă evoluţie spre o societate mai democratică.

În ultimii ani, un val de reacţii negative împotriva populaţiei rome în general şi a femeilor rome în special se poate observa în mass media românească şi europeană, confirmând încă o dată că opinia publică e încă dominată de stereotipuri şi prejudecăţi în privinţa etniei rome. În acelaşi timp, studii recente arată o creştere a nivelului de intoleranţă al societăţii româneşti faţă de populaţia de etnie romă. În acest context, prezenţa femeilor rome în sfera publică europeană a fost şi continuă să fie un subiect controversat, aspecte relevante ale vieţilor lor fiind neglijate, în timp ce sunt scoase în evidenţă elemente tradiţionale sau acte antisociale, aceste femei fiind trecute la categoria „cauze” ale unor probleme sociale ele nefiind considerate, aşa cum ar fi corect, persoane ale căror vieţi/condiţii reflectă politici publice şi construcţii culturale nedrepte. Acest fapt conduce la construcţia unei imagini false care nu reflectă identităţile femeilor rome.

Acest fenomen (de învinovăţire/blamare) nu este caracteristic doar societăţii româneşti actuale, ci are adânci rădăcini în istorie, atât în cea românească cât şi în cea europeană, femeile rome fiind în mod continuu prezentate, prin intermediul diferitelor medii, în posturi stereotipice şi denigratoare. Construcţiile acestor imagini false ce nu reflectă identităţile femeilor rome (ci reflectă doar situaţiile de marginalitate în care le plasează societăţile majoritare) se constituie în adevărate cercuri vicioase, care acţionează atât la nivelul mentalului colectiv, accentuând rasismul din societate, cât şi asupra altor mecanisme sociale, şi care predetermină/prefigurează în mod negativ modul de viaţă şi perspectivele copiilor de etnie romă.

Această broşură este rezultatul colaborării unui grup mixt de femei rome şi non-rome şi se doreşte a fi o analiză a imaginii femeilor rome în cultura şi spaţiul public românesc şi european, atât a felului în care această imagine şi procesele construirii ei participă la crearea stereotipurilor şi a practicilor de excludere şi marginalizare, cât şi a felului în care posibilităţile femeilor rome de a-şi construi un spaţiu al lor – eliberat de rasism şi prejudecăţi – şi de a vorbi prin propria voce, se pot contura. Analiza intersecţională a situaţiei femeilor rome pe care prezenta broşura şi-o propune rămâne profund conştientă de faptul că noi, cele care am contribuit la alcătuirea ei, avem privilegiul de a vorbi dintr-o poziţie favorizată, prin faptul că noi toate am avut acces la educaţie, prin faptul că o parte dintre noi suntem femei „albe”, prin faptul că avem posibilitatea să dăm voce opiniilor şi dorinţelor noastre de schimbare. Vocile acelor femei care sunt cele mai marginalizate, cele mai exploatate, cele mai precare, cele mai ignorate rămân încă să se facă auzite. Păstrând în minte acest fapt, această broşură – al cărei scop practic este să fie folosită în licee pentru a provoca dezbateri despre rasism, sexism, marginalizare şi strategii de combatere ale acestora – îşi doreşte să se adreseze atât celor marginalizaţi/marginalizate, în speranţa că ar putea servi ca un instrument care să provoace o analiză a situaţiei lor în perspectiva unei schimbări, cât şi majoritarilor, ca un instrument care să-i determine să conştientizeze şi să-şi recunoască propria situaţie privilegiată, indiferent că e vorba de privilegiul de a fi „alb”, privilegiul masculin, de clasă socială, etc., recunoaşterea acestor privilegii deschizând posibilitatea unei contestări eficiente a relaţiilor ierarhice din societate, relaţii care menţin anumite categorii într-o stare continuă de marginalitate.

O giravipen

Dikh man kadă sar sem. Lava aj dikimata le rromnenqe

And-e savorri Euròpa, e rroma зiven and-o baro ćorripen, biedukaćiaqo aj bibutăqo, kaj keren ka von te na зiven but, aj lenqo patisarel te avel peravdo. Sar membrùra le etnìaqe kaj sas but uśtăvdi bute sekolenθar vi adies si kadă, e situàćie le rromnenqe si phari, kadale si k-e intersèkćia bute diskriminàćia: etnìaqo, gender aj klàsa soćiàlo. Jekh baro gin le rromnenqo зiven palal kadave koordonàtura, astarde maśkar e diskriminàćia le societaqi (kaj dikhel len isindoj jekh etnìa ”laзani”, ”traśarni”, ”purane”, etc) aj maśkar e dikriminacie jekhe societaqi patriarxàlo( kaj inkerel le зuvlen and-o peravipen aj aćhipen, aj ćhon len te kerel bută kaj von phenen k-e si nùmaj andar e зuvlă) aj maśkar e societaqi kaj si na maj andar o individualìsmo, konsumo( kaj kamel vaś e reprodùkcia le kapitalismosqe ka aver kategorie manuśenθar te aven inkerde and-o baro ćorripen).

E ćorre rromnă зiven and-e jekh lùmă kaj i diskriminàćia, e exkluderea aj o dinipen avri fal amenqe sar jekh baxtipen nasul kaj na daśti te na dikhas les, kaj e rromnă asumin lenqe peravde bută, si len jekh akceso tikno k-e edukaćia, k-o sastipen, inkeren but dukha aj butvar зiven le traśaça ke daśti aven dine avri kaθar lenqe khera; but rromnă keren butĭ aj si dine rigaθe.

And-e palutne berśa, generalosθe,sas but nasul reàkćie and-e rumunikani mass-mèdia vi europeanikani andar e rromani populàćia aj speciàlo andar e rromnă sikavindoj inke jekh var k-e soćietèta rumunikani si pherdi diskriminàćia, xatărimata andar e rroma. And-o sa kadă vaxt, e palutne studiòvura sikaven jekh bari intoleranća la societaqi rumunikani anglal e rromani etnìa. And-o kadava kontèxto, o dikipen le rromnenqo and-e publikani europaqi sfèra sas aj si vi akana jekh subièkto kaj kerel nasulimata, aj von na si sikavde sar von, si biprinзarde, aj si sikavde e elemèntură tradićionale vaj antisoćiale bută, kadave rromnă si nakhle k-e kategoria ”kaùze” le socialenqe problèmură aj na si sikavde sar manuśa kaj o lenqo зivipen sikavel e publikane politika aj kultùrane kerdimata bilaćhe/bićaće.

Kadava butĭ gelel k-e jekh xoxavdi imàgina, kaj na sikavel e identitètură le rromenqe. Kadava fenomèno (dośalipen) naj karakteristilo nùmaj andar e rumunikani societaqi andar kadava vaxt, ci si len bare darina and-e istoria, rumunikani vi europanikani, e rromnă si sikavde palal bisarane mèdiura, stereotìpură. Kadava xoxavde imàgina kaj na sikaven e identitètură le rromnenqe( sikaven e situàćie kaj e rromnă si diskrimine) keren pen and-e niśte truja nasul, kaj butăren o godipen le manuśenqo, barindoj o rasìsmo aj kaj influencil negatìvo o зivipen le ćhavenqo aj o lengo avutnipen.

Kadava liloro si o rezultàto andar o sombutĭpen jekhe mixto grpo rromnenθar vi gajenθar aj kamel te avel jekh analìza le rromnenqi imàgina and-e kultùra, vi publiko rumunikano spàcio vi europanikano; aj sar kadale imàgina aj lenqe procèsura daśti te keren stereotìpură, diskriminàćia aj sar daśti e rromnă te keren jekh than kaj te avel na maj lenqo aj kothe te daśti te phenen so kamen. E analìza intersektionàla le situaćienqe la rromnenqe kaj o amaro liloro kamel te sikavel lan, зanas k-e ame, kaj kerdem lan, si amen o lośalipen te das duma andar jekh than laćho, andar o fakto ke amen si amen akceso k-i edukaćia, ke jekh rig amenθar si ”parne” зuvlă, ke daśti te phenas so ame kamas te paruvas. E vaka le зuvlenqe kaj si but peravde, diskrimine, ignorisarde aćhon te keren pen aśunde. Inkerindoj godĭ kadava butĭ, kadaja liloro- si lan i res te avel labardi and-e liceura kaj te keren vakărimata andar o rasismo,sexo, marginalizacia, aj sar te keras te na maj aven- kamel te avel andar e manuśa marginalizime, kamas te avaa jekh instrumènto kaj te kerel jekh analìza lenqe situaćienqe ka te paruven pen, vi le gaзen sar jekh instrumènto kaj daśti te keren len te den pe godi ke von si baxtale, ke phenas andar o baxtalipen ke san ”parno”, ke san murś, ke aves andar jekh soćiàlo kategoria ,etc; o prinзaripen kadave baxtalimata daśti te putres o sajipen te phenes andar e relàćie kaj mukhen nesave kategorie and-e jekh marginelitèta kaj tavdel maj dur.

Introduction

See me as I am. Words and images of Roma women

Roma live under the threshold of poverty all over Europe. They have limited access to education and labour, which causes their life expectancy to be much lower than that of people in the majority and annihilates their self-esteem, thus determining them to repress their own identity.

As members of an ethnic group which has been oppressed for centuries and continues to this day to be marginalized, Roma women have an even more complicated situation, as they are targets of multiple forms of discrimination: ethnic, gender and social. Most Roma women live their life inside this coordinates, trapped between the discrimination of the majority who see them as part of an “undignified,” “dangerous,” “primitive” ethnic group, as well as the discrimination of a patriarchal society (which maintains women in marginalization and silence, putting on their shoulders the burden of labour considered exclusively “feminine” as well as the burden of prescriptions inherent to “femininity”) and the discrimination of a society revolving around individualism, property and consumption (a society which needs the multiplication of capital, which is based on the continuing status of isolation and poverty of certain categories of people). Roma women of poor economic means live in a world in which discrimination, exclusion and marginalization seem to be an inevitable destiny, perpetuated for generations. They exclusively assume household and caring labour, they have precarious access to the health and education systems, they suffer physical and verbal violence because of their gender and ethnicity, they frequently live in improvised shelter, in perennial fear of being evacuated by the authorities or being put to fire by extremist groups. Most labour that Roma women have access to is rejected by the majority population as it is difficult and considered degrading. Their reproduction is deemed “dangerous” to the “purity of the nation.” They witness their children suffering the same discrimination as themselves, despite neoliberal discourse promising an apparent evolution towards a more democratic society.

In recent years, a wave of negative reactions against Roma population in general and Roma women in particular can be noticed in Romanian and European mass media, thus confirming yet again that public opinion is still dominated by stereotypes and prejudice about Roma people. At the same time, recent studies show an increase in the level of intolerance of Romanian society towards Roma people. In this context, the presence of Roma women in the public European sphere continues to be a controversial topic. Relevant aspects of their lives are overlooked while traditional or antisocial elements are highlighted. Roma women are listed under “causes” of social issues and are not considered as persons whose life/condition reflects unjust public policies and cultural constructs. This leads to the construction of a false image which does not reflect the identities of Roma women.

This phenomenon (of blaming) is not typical only to current Romanian society, but is deeply rooted in history, both Romanian and European. Roma women have been consistently presented, through the different media, in stereotypical and denigrating positions. These false images which do not reflect the identities of Roma women (but only the marginal situations in which they are placed by majority-led societies) have become a vicious circle which impacts not only the collective mentality, and thus lead to increased racism in society, but it also negatively impacts social mechanisms which shape the livelihood and horizons of Roma children.

This brochure is the result of cooperation between a mixed group of Roma and non-Roma women and it proposes an analysis of Roma women in the Romanian and European culture and public space, looking at how this image and the processes by which it is constructed are connected to the appearance of stereotypes and the practices of marginalization and exclusion, and looking also at the ways in which Roma women may come to build a space of their own, free from racism and prejudice, where they can have their voice heard. The intersectional analysis of the situation of Roma women that this brochure presents is based on the awareness that us, those who have put it together, have the privilege of speaking from a favoured position, because we had access to education, because some of us are considered as “white” women, because we can freely express our opinions and desire to change the status quo. The voices of those who are marginalized, ignored, exploited, living in precarity, remain yet to make themselves heard. Bearing this in mind, this brochure – whose practical purpose is to be used in high schools for debating the issues of racism, sexism, marginalization and solutions to effectively address them – is addressed both to those marginalized, in hope that it will become an instrument of analysis and change, as well as to those in the majority, in the hope that it will determine them to become aware of their own privileged situation. Whether we talk about the privilege of being “white,” male, of higher class etc., acknowledging these privileges will open the perspective of truly challenging social hierarchies, which have been maintaining certain categories of people in marginalization for a very long time.

Descarca publicatia:

Download publication:

http://seemeasiam.wordpress.com/

2009-10-29T02:55:00.001-07:00

Without borders? Some critical reflections on European and global border conditions. Workshop by Kontekst and h.arta

http://workshopwithoutborders.wordpress.com/

Positioning in borderless Europe

A conversation between h.arta and Kontekst

Kontekst: You are living and working in a former Eastern European country which is now part of the EU. We are currently witnessing general euphoria in Europe regarding the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Many exhibitions and projects related to the topic have been organized, art works produced, etc. How would you comment on that?

h.arta: In the early nineties, after the end of the communist regime and during the period of “transition” in Romania, there was a sentence commonly used in the political speeches from the entire ideological specter and broadly reproduced through the mass media: “Now finally, Romania can start to belong to Europe again”. This sentence repeated in sentimental references to the sacrifices of the revolution or in practical observations about the sacrifices needed to be made by the population in order to insure the success of the transition and the process of joining the EU, meant the same thing in both cases: the communist period was such a powerful abnormality that it had the ability not only to stop time and keep our country away from the developments of Europe, but also to challenge its spatial perception. This was the message sent out during the transition period and this is the message also contained now in the celebrations of the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall: the countries of the socialist block lived for almost 50 years in a confined space and in a gap in history that should be erased in order to return to the “normality” signified by the freedom of circulation (more of capital than of people). The “borderless” Europe that is celebrated this year through so many cultural events (and perhaps the current economic crisis and the questions this crisis raises regarding the success of global neo-liberalism is a catalyst of this celebratory euphoria) is the end result of this process of erasing all differences, the process through which poverty and exploitation are hidden under an apparent freedom of movement for everyone.

Kontekst: What you describe is symptomatic of how the EU-Europe constructs itself through the idea of belonging: belonging to Western Europe (liberal capitalist). This idea is actually an ideology that means expansion (of course of its markets). To belong to Europe means to belong to Western Europe. This process is not a dynamic process of exchange (though it is often presented as such). It is a one-way process as Tihomir Topuzovski explained. To belong means to adopt and implement a wide range of so called values belonging to Western democracies which of course make the process of exploitation possible and secure. However, if we take a look at the history of colonialism as the European modernity project and also if we are not blind to what is going on at the moment where Europe is increasingly sinking into processes which Žarana Papić termed the fascisation of societies, we must ask ourselves what values we are really talking about here.

h.arta: How is the topic of Kultur Kontakt’s broader international project “Without Borders” relevant in the context of your work?

Kontekst: Regarding the question of context and since we are speaking from two contexts (as one of us currently lives in Vienna and one in Belgrade) we would like to mention two events from our contexts, which are paradigmatic for the current situation in contemporary Europe which would also answer your question. One is “Operation Spring”, the biggest police raid since WW2 launched in Austria in 1999 when more than a hundred African migrants were imprisoned and accused without proper proof in the trials under the shield of “fighting organized crime”. This operation is part of the ongoing practice of criminalization and violence against migrants in Austria in the last 10 years (the same situation also exists in other EU countries). The other event is the “Belgrade Universiade 2009”, an international sports event for which occasion an informal Roma settlement situated next to the athletes’ residential area was brutally dismantled by the city authorities in order to produce an image of “clean” Belgrade and “clean” Serbia. Thus, both events tell us a great deal about alarmingly institutionalized racism and nationalism which must be seen in connection with European colonial history, European nationalism with its war politics and present neo-liberal policy that values profit more then human life and that needs hierarchies in order to keep running. Hence, Europe after 1989 tells us about these and many other discriminatory developments and not about justice and democracy which is only nominally mentioned.

h.arta: Perhaps, further on, we could discuss our approach to the topic of the present “Without Borders” project. Later on we could also answer this question ourselves.

Kontekst: Concerning our conceptual approach to this topic, we think it is the only possible one: as soon as you are framed in such a way, you have to discuss the frame, and you have to analyze all processes that are hidden or invisibilized. Therefore, we want to show how capitalism functions and how hazardous it is.

On the methodological level, our decision was to consider how to attempt not to reproduce established hierarchical representation regimes immanent to the curatorial practice as we know it today (a practice that fails to question the division of labor and working conditions), and immanent to the institution of contemporary art. So, we are interested in researching work procedures and formats such as collective authorship, collaborative projects, and not hegemonic curatorial selection processes for the sake of pure representation and reproduction.

In that sense, we can go back to your own artistic practice. Can you go into more detail about your approach in developing your own concepts, methods and formats? As you have based your artistic practice on the rethinking of art space as space for informal networks, interdisciplinary joint work, reading texts, debates, workshops, screenings, etc, do you think such an approach can challenge “the neutrality” of the art space? And do you think it can generate a potential for new subject positions and practices?

h.arta: What is most important for us in our practice is to constantly question our position as artists, as citizens, as women based in a country that used to be part of the former „East“, as “white” women living what is now a „European“ country, as cultural workers who are part of a system with all its contradictions, with all its fakeness and hypocrisy sometimes and still with all its potential to produce meaningful analysis and critique. And, of course this work of continually examining one’s own role and position cannot be done outside collective practices, outside collaborative work and inter-disciplinary practice, trying to create models for work that bring theory as close as possible to practice and that also encourage debate and continually attempt to correct the inherent hierarchies that are created inside groups. We consider art to be a good method of making this sort of analysis possible, of creating the situations for meaningful encounters and discussions.

When you describe your own work it is always difficult to clarify within the structure of your writing the gap that always exists between some sort of ideal projection of what your work wishes to be and the actual accidents, failures, and compromises that your work inherently contains. And we think that it is in the very analysis of this gap where the potential for change lies.

We consider that perhaps the most relevant thing one can do in a world where exploitation and violence is always hidden under a screen of words (communist propaganda, Christian „morality“, neo-liberal „democracy“, etc), is to constantly make yourself aware of this gap between the words and the actual realities they conceal (while also constantly trying to correct your own gap between your words and your actual everyday life and decisions). This brings us back to our question about our position towards the topic of a „borderless“ Europe. We completely agree with your answer and we share your approach: when the general tone is one of celebration of the end of all contradictions, it is important to discuss exactly those contradictions and inequalities that are the fabric of the capitalist system.

Tihomir Topuzovski, “FROM THE IMAGINING OF THE BALKANS TO THE INVENTION OF THE WESTERN BALKANS”, Reartikulacija, Issue 6, Ljubljana, 2009, http://www.reartikulacija.org/RE6/ENG/hardcore6_1_ENG_topu.html

Žarana Papić, “Europe after 1989: ethnic wars, the fascisation of social life and body politics in Serbia”, in: Filozofski vestnik, special issue The Body, (ed.) Marina Gržinić Mauhler, FI ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, 2002, p. 191–205

2009-02-24T04:06:00.000-08:00

FEMINISME. Recapituland concepte si afirmand noi pozitii/ FEMINISMS. Reviewing concepts and affirming new positions

Book project, Timisoara, 2010

Contributors: Petja Dimitrova, Lina Dokuzovic&Eduard Freudmann, F.I.A. Group, C.A.R.E. Centre, Carmen Gheorghe, Simina Guga, h.arta, Reni Hofmueller, Katharina Koch, Monica Melin, Nita Mocanu, Katharina Morawek.

The book is available for download here:

http://feminisme.ro/blog/?p=35

INTRODUCTION

Feminism reduced to the communist failure of “state feminism”, which, although it led to the inception of an emancipation process by including women on the labour market, ended with the state controlling women’s bodies, through Nicolae Ceauşescu’s birth rate boosting policy.

Feminism reduced to gender mainstreaming, which resulted in Romania’s passing of laws related to gender, under the pressure of European Union accession conditions, resulted in a “normalization” of gender issues and in creating an appearance of democracy and gender equality imposed “from above.”

Feminism reduced to the concept of “equal opportunities,” integrated in a context which put competition and meritocracy among the chief elements on which democracy is based.

Feminism reduced to women’s possibility to “choose” between having a career and having a family, even if this choice is possible only for women financially capable of making it (since for most women this means dividing their time and energy between work-related responsibilities and housework-related responsibilities, which are often not shared), and even if most women are under constant conservative pressures that makes it difficult for them to renounce the idea of matrimony and motherhood.

Feminism reduced to political correctness both in mainstream culture as well as in the discourse of intellectual elites, reduced to an imported form of hypocrisy, alien to the Christian “values” of our people.

Feminism reduced to a movement that deprived women of their “femininity” and which is aiming to undermine “natural” relations between the two sexes – in a context in which misogynistic, homophobic and racist discourses (which, for example, question Romanian women’s right to abortion but express concern regarding the fertility of Roma women) are becoming a more and more frequent occurrence.

These are the meanings of feminism most frequently encountered in the mass media and public addresses. These interpretations range from an inclusion of feminism in a neoliberal apparent democracy in which women are important as participants in consumerism, to a conservative condemnation of feminism as a dangerous trend that undermines “natural” gender roles, or a trend that is alien to the orthodox foundations of Romanian culture.

Reacting unfavourably to these interpretations and replacing ideology with genuine interest for real people’s lives, different initiatives, groups and persons act upon the knowledge that it is necessary to approach feminism not as a label, but from multiple angles which allow the exploration of this mobile and flexible semantic and action platform.

As a result of cooperation with some of these groups, we organized between September, 2008 and May, 2009, a project entitled Feminisms. Histories, free spaces, participatory democracy, economic justice, a project which aimed to be a place of reflection on different feminist practices in Romania and abroad, on those questions, actions, approaches and practices which questions situations considered “normal,” which create new spaces and enlarge perspectives, which engage our creativity and courage to believe that there are alternatives to the existing system, that there are freer, more democratic ways and dignified ways of living, and that finding these alternatives depends on the gestures and actions of each and every one of us. This publication is an outcome of our project.

Starting from topics discussed in Feminisms, such as the importance of assuming feminist positions and methods in education, women’s labour, and precarity, the issue of feminist visibility and visibility of gender topics in general, the need to create spaces that are free of inequality, spaces where a more democratic and inclusive society can be projected, we have put together the chapters of the present book. This book aims to be a manual covering different aspects of feminism: labour and precarity, gender mainstreaming and postfeminism, heteronormativity, feminist education, transnational feminism. Each of these chapters are nuanced by “supplementary reading” consisting of texts and artistic interventions that, in their majority, have a connection to the events that took place in the project. These contributions, as examples of analysis and resistance, are the ones that actually give substance and concreteness to the concepts explained in the chapters of this book.

In 2006, we put together About Art and the Ways We Look at the World, a guidebook that resulted from our work as teachers and our practice as artists interested in triggering learning. About Art and the Ways We Look at the World was the outcome of our search for ways to teach and learn that go outside the narrow perspectives that so often present the only “Truth.” The decision to edit this book in the format of a manual addressing a wide circle of people and with a practical purpose, came from the same desire to avoid narrow definitions of the kind that this introduction begins with.

This publication is aware of its own limitations (some of a practical nature, such as the fact that we only had access to Romanian and English texts during the research stage, but also conceptual limitations deriving implicitly from the first category – since perspectives from certain parts of the region and the world remain unknown to us). Who determines what is relevant? Who has the power to give definitions? Whose experience is relevant? Why do we learn the things we learn? How can we establish which information is important to us and to our peers? How can feminist strategies and perspectives be used to analyse the power structures that global capitalism relies on? How could we best catalyse a process by which knowledge can no longer be the instrument of a society based on inequality, and how can we make it the instrument of dialogue and achieving a less suffocating reality?

The format of this book was also influenced by the nature of its relationship with the audience of our project. Because this project was a platform where different fields intersected, a debate arena that did not exclude domains other than art, we had not only a very diverse audience, but we even became the audience for the activities that our guests performed and the topics they brought to the discussion table. This fluid understanding of the concept of “expertise” involving both ends of the transfer process was the underlying premise of the way we decided to organize the contents of this book. This kind of book is a learning instrument both for us (who have been editing it at the same time as learning more in-depth about its topics) as well as for its readers. This seemed the most appropriate manner to reflect a project that aimed at being a prototype for methods that trigger knowledge anchored in daily life and situations that impact on how we acquire that knowledge. These methods are the result of cooperation and sharing by people from different environments and contexts, and they are permanently under scrutiny and change.

h.arta

Timisoara, 2010

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histories, free spaces, participative democracy, economical justice

september 2008- april 2009

www.feminisme.ro

Histories: emancipation, „transition’s costs”, politics of reproduction

Free spaces: solidarity, difference, queer, sharing, resist exploitation, grass-roots democracy, net activism, alternative economics, alliances

Participatory democracy: emancipatory education, empowerment, knowledge production, public space, visibility, culture jamming, free speech

Economical justice: women’s labour, transnational ethics, immaterial labour, precarity, women’s economic rights, reproductive labour, „efficient” bodies, glass- ceilings, gender hierarchies, sexual division of labour, migration

“Feminism” is a difficult word to use in present Romania. After the emancipatory politics of the early communist regime, that at the beginning of 1950’s led to a development of women movement, later, during the regime of Ceauşescu, “emancipation” and “feminism” became only empty words, covering the gloomy reality of the thousands of deaths of women as a result of the pronatalist politics. After 1989, during the transition time and in the present women and men publicly declaring themselves as being feminists have to face a double blame. On the one hand the word carries the implications of the former communist regime, and on the other hand, in the present mostly conservatory public discourses, “feminism” is generally considered as being a concept “imported from the West” that has no relevance for our society based on “Christian” rules.

As condition to the integration in the European Union, Romania adopted a series of laws with a gender content (the Law for Preventing and Combating all Forms of Discrimination (2002), the Law on Equality of Opportunity between Women and Men (2002), the Law for Preventing and Combating Violence in the Family (2003). The adoption of these laws is an important step in the struggle for gender equality. But still, the fact that these laws where adopted on a purely legislative level, without the appropriate institutional frame that would put them into practice, and the fact that their adoption was a result of external pressures and not an outcome of the pressures made by the civil society, by the ones whom these laws are actually addressing, all these are diminishing the effectiveness and the power of change of these laws. These laws are reflecting the “democratical” face of capitalism. Aspects with an important gender content, such as precarity, poverty, migration, aspects that have as a direct result violence and discrimination, are not under the incidence of these laws. If you consider that you live in a society where all the gender issues were successfully normalized, then the problems that you are actually living are becoming only your personal failures, without any general relevance. The illusion of normality that these laws are creating have an effect of desolidarization, in the conditions of a society where all the facets of life are commodified and where living beings and ideas are important only if they are contributing to the accumulation of capital.

An efficient discussion about patriarchy can be made only if its connection to capitalism is clearly shown, only if the network of privileges and power, on which global capitalism is structured, is analysed. A discussion that would not limit itself to the listing of different forms of oppression but that would refer also to the responsibility that each of us has to oppose these oppressions.

Feminisms is a tool for analysis and action.

Feminisms is a structure that brings together different initiatives, with their different purposes and approaches, a structure that creates a platform for discussions, interactions, alliances, for a multiple definition of the term “feminisms”, a definition that does not take the form of a label but that is a mobile and flexible basis for interpreting and for acting.

Feminisms is an artistic project that is motivated by our need to demonstrate that there are alternatives, that there are efficient tools by which a reality always seen as a monolith, all-encompassing and unchangeable can be questioned and transformed. Even if this transformation is constructed out of small gestures.

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Are you talking to me ? Discussion on knowledge production, gender politics and feminist strategies

ed. : Katharina Morawek and h.arta group

Contributions by: Carolina Agredo, Anna Artaker, Elke Auer, Zanny Begg, Lina
Dokuzovic, Veronika Eberhart, Eva Egermann , Eva Cruells, Marina Grzinic, Simina Guga, h.arta, Ana Hoffner, Reni Hofmüller, Maja- Lena Johansson, Ivan Jurica, Vida Knezevic, Katharina Koch, Lisbeth Kovacic, Ladyfest Romania collective, Lovekills, Roxana Marin, Ivana Marjanovic, Julia Mitterbauer, Emil Moise, Katharina Morawek, Crina Morteanu, Lilo Nein, Gerhild Perl, Alina Poşircă, Rosa Reitsamer, Joanne Richardson, Karin Schneider, Sabine Sölkner, Esther Straganz, Andi Tennis, Lisa Torell, Julia Wieger, Veronika Wöhrer, Regina Wuzella, Vina Yun.

Loecker Verlag, Vienna, 2008

The book Are you talking to me? Discussions on knowledge production, gender politics and feminist strategies is a result of the collaboration between the Post Conceptual Art Practices (PCAP) department at The Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna/ Prof. Marina Gržinić and h.arta group at the invitation of Bucharest Biennale 3.

Introduction

This book was conceptualized and developed following the idea of asking questions. Not only is this an outcome of previous practices of its editors, but it is also the attempt to ask: What does it mean to pose a question? What does it mean to answer? What about the feminist movement during communism?

As Veronika Wöhrer points out in her contribution (referring to Jiøina Šmejkalová), the assumption that there were no feminist movements, theories or activism during state communist times, turns out to be a myth. Western scholars or activists often locate

a certain lack of theory within post-communist countries, which includes assumptions about the »need« of post-communist activists and scholars, and ideas about what an interesting or useful theory should be like. The image that is inscribed here, is that the »rich west« should share its feminist theory with the »poor East«. In fact, the situation was very different: the contexts for »Eastern« feminist ideas, activities and publications

were different, also the terminologies deviated from international »mainstream« feminist or gender debates and therefore often remained unacknowledged.

State feminism from Romanian communist times (at the beginning of the 1950’s) led to a genuine emancipation of women. Later, during the regime of Ceausescu, »emancipation« and »feminism« became empty phrases, covering the gloomy reality of thousands of dead women as a result of the regime’s pronatalist politics – deaths occurring before the background of official hymns glorifying a generic »Woman«. Nevertheless, some women did find their ways to revolt, or at least they would have wanted to – the illegal abortions performed by them being in itself some way of revolting.

Even though »state feminism« was functional for state communism in the sense of turning women into »emancipated« workers, activists and mothers (and, by being part of the collective, they were productive for the »cause«) many questions regarding women´s rights were dismissed. Today, the collective is disused – in any case among the youth and among opponents of nostalgia. Masses of individual warriors, everyone is working

hard on her personal strategy.

In the context of Romania, this is especially true since the integration process into the European Union has started. There are some Women’s Studies courses at the universities, but what about feminist traditions? Today, feminism or the question of women’s rights are very often reflected as something that had been imposed from the outside, as something in violation of the traditional roles of women, roles that would necessarily be associated with some sort of national mark. At the same time, the emancipated socialist

woman is referred to as an »import«. In Romanian mainstream discourses – from tabloid articles to opinions stated by some of the elite intellectuals – the main critique of feminism is that it is a notion »imported from the West«. The concepts of both Gender Mainstreaming and feminism are often understood under the same label of »alien« discourses.

Romanian video-activist Joanne Richardson analyses in her text that »[t]he problem with post-communism is not that it rejects the communist past, but that it does so superficially and opportunistically, and that its ultimate aim is not to pass judgment on the history of communist regimes but to disparage any new ideas that invoke the common, the collective, the public, and even activism itself.« Richardson also criticises »the tendency to idealize open structures as a cure-all, as if all social and economic problems would

simply vanish if everyone got a chance to participate and communicate without restraints – a perfect liberal democratic utopia. But openness need not mean a systemic change or even a culture in which everyone thinks for themselves. [...] In a society that’s predominantly patriarchal, homophobic, and racist; openness and ‘free expression’ can simply mean imposing the voice of the majority to the exclusion of the rights of minorities.«

So, how to address questions of social inequality or sexual politics? What are the differences and similarities between the perception of »state feminisms« from communist times and the »new«, »European« Gender Mainstreaming? What is the role of the actual woman advocating feminism in relation to these two forms of »equality from above«? And what is the relation between feminism and Gender Mainstreaming? The principle

of Gender Mainstreaming aims at the (re-)organization, improvement and development of policy processes in such a way that gender equality is actively taken into consideration at the level of policy-making. It focuses on different political actors in stimulating them to take the principle of gender equality into serious consideration. Although some European Union member states have started to implement Gender Mainstreaming, the strategy of implementation is still vague and open for a variety of different interpretations.

In a way, the same abstract »woman« that was a reference point for state feminism is the one that is protected today in the several anti-discrimination laws that Romania »received« from »Europe« during the European Union integration process: the

Law for Preventing and Combating all Forms of Discrimination (2002), the Law on Equality of Opportunity between Women and Men (2002), the Law for Preventing and Combating Violence in the Family (2003). But the question that arises reading these laws (which are translated into Romanian in such an artificial language that you silently need to re-translate them into English while reading, in order to understand which concepts they refer to[1]) is what is the efficiency of this imported notion that exists at a purely legislative level and that is not connected to a political agenda or public pressure? Who do these laws about »gender equality« really protect with their raw generalizations? For example, they accentuate the public sphere and are explicitly labour-related, but neglect the private realm and connected problems of domestic violence. What is the role of these laws, besides provoking the feeling that there is nothing left to fight for any more and furthermore giving the post-feminist glossy magazines new reasons to explain »the power of femininity«? The transformation processes that post-communist countries are facing since their integration processes into the European Union are to be seen in a very critical way, though they are termed as »democratization« (politically) and »liberation« (culturally).

This book wants to ask further: which kinds of transitions are taking place? What is the meaning of democratisation and liberation, if resulting in a liberal democracy that administrates the rights of their citizens, but that keeps the sovereignty to define what these rights are?

An important manoeuvre which is characteristic for processes of transition is the re-writing of ourstories/theirstories. This leads to the question: in which ways is the so-called post-communist »silence« about feminism connected to the history of the roles of women in communist times and to the roles of women in present-day Romanian society?

Keeping in mind Romanian women from the recent past and from the present, women dying of self-provoked abortions, women supporting most of the exhausting economical burden of the times of »transition«, women raising their children with minimal public support, women economically forced to choose between career and motherhood, women experiencing the effects of »glass ceilings« in their jobs, women facing daily discriminations; the texts in this book reflect the space between their/our

lives and the perception of women within state policies. And keeping in mind the different positions about the institutionalisation of »women’s politics«, the book discusses the diversity of those positions through the diversity of the topics tackled, topics that interrelate education and knowledge production, feminist strategies, anti-authoritarian stances and politics of representation.

It is important for this book to propose and call for alternative herstories of women and to ask questions about generations – not generation in a biologistic sense but in the sense of conflict lines and her/historical transfer. The questions that this book poses are aimed towards the translational action that many of the texts already take into account.

A translation that picks up questions, acts upon suggestions and re-designs the question after the answer.

Through interviews with the participants and contributors, the goal of the book is to translate this collaborative approach into a visible form.

This publication is an attempt to contribute to the archive of her/histories.

It is an attempt to ask questions.

h.arta and Katharina Morawek

Timişoara/Vienna, April 2008

[1] According to Theodora-Eliza Vacarescu in her essay »(Not) Made in Romania. To import or not – this shouldn’t be the problem«, in: Black Book of Equal Opportunities between Women and Men in Romania,

Bucharest 2006

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NATO Meeting (d’apres Ion Grigorescu)

by h.arta group

Between 2-4 of April 2008, a NATO summit took place in Bucharest.

The attempts to react to this summit or to use it as an occasion to bring into a public discussion subjects as war, stability and peace keeping missions in the context of global capitalism were the subject of intense monitoring and control from the part of the state.

An atmosphere of terror was created, starting weeks before the summit, through different means, like the mass-media campaign that constructed an image of the "dangerous anarchists" that will destroy the city and our image of nice, obeying country, like the denial of entry at the border to people on the reason that they had on them flyers against NATO and against violence, like the harassment of the people involved in organizing some form of protest and also of their families and friends, like the surveillance of phones and internet activity made official and legal, etc.

Different rules and regulations were specially created for the occasion of the summit, interfering with the everyday life of Bucharest. People were detained by police just for looking like “anarchists”, for carrying heavy bags with them, for walking around in bigger groups.

The city of Bucharest was cleansed of everything that may interfere with our image of nice, „European” country (from the removal of homeless people from its streets, people who were forcefully sent to “shelters” in the middle of nowhere, to the gathering of the stray dogs that were picked up from the streets and kept in shelters only to be sent back to the streets immediately the summit ended and to the intention to stop any form of resistance and protest, no matter how peaceful or discreet).

Despite all these forms of intimidation and control, some people did organise and did find ways to state their opposition to war and militarization. A space was rented in Bucharest as a place for discussion, workshops, screenings. On the 2nd of April, the first day of summit, the riot police entered this space, they beat up people and they arrested everybody inside without any legal basis, just on the presumption that "something might happen". Later on that day, they had to release everybody, as a consequence of the interventions of human rights groups and of people piqueting the police stations.

This abusive action from the part of the police created the conditions in which some forms of protest became possible. Quiet marches were organised through the city.

Having a constant interest in finding small, everyday, unpretentious strategies and models for resistance, we had planned to walk around in Bucharest wearing clothing with some simple, clear statements written on them, statements making the connection between war and violence on the one side and profit and capital on the other. In the conditions in which to express your citizen right to the freedom of speech would automatically make you a “terrorist”, we wanted to do these simple, everyday actions of taking a walk, window shopping and making tourist photos, by these questioning the association between violence and protest, association that was so elaborately constructed. The fact that on the 4^th of April, we were able to have a long walk through the center of Bucharest, wearing our anti NATO messages and without being detained by the police, was made possible by the people taking action before us (since the first day of the summit) in spite of the fact that they were subjected to the abuses of the police.

In 1975, Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu clandestinely took photos in one of the so-called “spontaneous” electoral meeting for Nicolae Ceauşescu, meeting strictly controlled by the infiltrated members of the Securitate [1]. The disturbing presence of these observers is symbolical for the constant surveillance that was an essential feature of Ceauşescu’s totalitarian regime. During our walk through Bucharest (same as on the entire period of the summit and also on our way back to our town, Timişoara) we were constantly observed by members of the secret police. They appear in the photos that we took of ourselves on the sunny streets of Bucharest, anonymous, mixed with the regular people. Taking these photos was also our mean of reacting with some form of observing to their constant observing.

One of the main critiques of Romanian communism is constructed exactly in relation to this constant surveillance, to the fact that you could not trust anybody and that all your moves and all your words were unceasingly observed. Now, when in our country any idea of the left is so righteously condemned as "totalitarian" and "communist" with the purpose to reinforce capitalism even more, as the only possible alternative, the constant surveillance and control is still part of the everyday life. It is enough to state publicly your opinions, to try to have some sort of critical stance towards the way Romania is on now, and you will be subjected to the same sort of surveillance as before 1989, even if now we are living the "freedom" times of capitalism.

[1] Ion Grigorescu - Electoral meeting, March 6 1975, 28 photo-series

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work presented in the frame of:

June 2008: „cannot do everything“. Civil and Social Disobedience, Galerie IG Bildende Kunst, Vienna and Kunstraum :emyt, Berlin, curators: Jens Kastner and Elisabeth Bettina Spörr

September- October 2008: 49th October Salon, Belgrade , Artist-Citizen, curator: Bojana Pejić

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Four snapshots

A text by h.arta with comments by Monica Melin

The Art Academy

To enter:

An essay on the sculptural ensemble of Constantin Brancusi from Targu Jiu, a charcoal study and an oil painting study of a still life.

To exit:

An essay comparing different painting stiles in the XIX-th century (…or was it only a comparison between Realism and Impressionism?), a nude study using a colour contrast at choice and, of course the diploma work that had to be much bigger in size than any of the works done before.

…I remember that I didn´t care about the rules for the applications to enter.. never thought I would enter anyway.., but then, I entered, and it worried me.. the “general” artist identity was not really my bag. Probably things were changing…but 5 years later I was told that some of my student collegues hated my exam work and it didn´t surprise me. /Monica

Between entrance and exit there were five years around which revolved the same ideas. There were six years for the ones that graduated before me, four years for the ones that graduated after me, and starting with the generation that graduates this year, only 3 years, according to the Bologna system. I don’t know if this is good or bad, this shrinking of the years of study, when it comes to Art Academy.

12-13 years ago, when I joined Art Academy, there used to be a limited number of students and the education was free for everyone. Now things are different: there are much more students, but only for a very few of them the education is tax-free. Talking with Monica about this, about the huge number of students, about the education tax and about the difficulties that these students experience after graduation, when they try to find an art-related job, she asked me if art students are generally coming from wealthy families. The truth is that students are part of different social categories and that many of them are not from rich families. How come then that they choose such an insecure profession?

… wonder if the gap between art and the general public there in Timosioara is smaller there than here, I mean since it seams like it’s not only middle- and upper class that are studying art. I doubt, but anyway I have a feeling thatsome of the feministic art here in Sweden, in the latest years, at least has attracted a new group of general public to the Swedish art scene, but maybe it’s only in my mind.../ Monica

Me, I wanted to study something different, something interesting, something that would open up for me more possibilities. But I didn’t know that these possibilities are not so many, that this promised large number of possibilities could equal many times a large number of compromises. You become the specialist in the “beautiful”, and this means that you can give advises in things like what people should wear, how should they decorate their homes or how can a room be adorned for a corporate party. If you want to have a critical discourse and if you are interested in issues that have not much to do with the “beautiful”, this could mean that you failed in your carrier. You should have chosen to study something else. Political sciences, maybe? Philosophy?

During my five years at Art Academy, I have never heard the word “feminism”. I heard many times the word “feminine” instead. It was important to avoid that your work would be labelled as “feminine” even if the majority of the students were girls. We were constantly trying to go beyond our condition of women and to tackle as general and abstract things as possible in our works. Our experiences as women were completely irrelevant. The more “feminine” things could find their place only in the fashion design department and maybe in the art pedagogy department. In my five years of study I don’t remember doing any artwork that would have had a direct connection to my life experience.

Well in Sweden ... to be very personal, for women I mean, is at least more accepted now than 10 years ago, but who knows, have a feeling that it´s more or less “over and done” now… new trends are coming, or what to say.../ Monica

Painting, Graphics, Sculpture, Design, Art Pedagogy, Fashion design- this would be the order of the importance that the different departments have inside the Art Academy. When I was a student, the only women who had the title of professor were the ones that teach at Fashion design department. Of course there were other women working in the Art Academy, but they were only assistants. Meanwhile, things did change. While visiting the Art Academy with Monica and Dan, we had the big surprise to find out that the new dean is a woman from the graphics department, a woman that didn’t had an important position in the school formal and informal hierarchies while we were still students. Maybe things start to change? Can things change only because the dean is a woman? From the discussion that Monica had with the new dean, you could think that there is no problem whatsoever when it comes to the access of women to leading positions in the academy. Apparently the number of women and men professors is equal in the faculty, although of course women are dominating the more “feminine” departments. But still, why isn’t there any gender awareness in the Art Academy? Maybe, the women professors are afraid them too, same as their students, of being labelled as too “feminine”?

…seems similar… being connected with women’s issues sometimes means that someone else defines you as the “weak” or being a” man-hater” or the” less important”… almost somehow to be excluded even before you started. Very tricky… I prefer not saying anything about feminism in advancand not even after if no one asks. Then people get it in their own way, and things are not so clear, but of course both strategies are needed.../Monica

The Union of Visual Artists

“How old were you in 1989?” is a question that I am often asked, same as others from my generation. The end of the communist regime is something that we all feel as a landmark in our private lives, as something splitting our memories into “before” and “after”. In 1989 we were old enough to remember how life was “before” and we were also young enough to be not involved, not marked, not traumatised or not profiting out of the former regime. At least this is how I feel, now, when I am 30 and when my country is completely embracing capitalism, when more and more of the public property is sold out to private investors and when more and more aspects of life are controlled by the rules of the market economy: I feel old enough to remember and young enough to have the energy of taking a critical stance. I /we feel that it is really important to try to explain as clear as possible the complicated relation between our communist past and our (many times) unquestioned capitalist present, and we think that art and culture are an important field for this analysis to happen.

… makes me think about fear and maybe recollections of punishment, like being excluded. If there is something to loose, something that is valuable a radical change could seem like freedom even if you have to grasp it all, and for some it probably is... I keep thinking about the fact and the consequenses of depending on “someone’s” money to “survive”, as an artist …/ Monica

Also, I feel that a special kind of sadness, of diffuse nostalgia for some past that never really happened, some longing to find new meanings to words that were misused, all these are an important part of who I am as a person now, of my interior landscape at this point. I would like to hear people opposing words like “solidarity” and “equality” to words like “competition” and “profit”, even if solidarity and equality have a “communist” ring to them when used in Romania. I would like so much to be able to use sentences like “all people should be equal” without having in my mind the sound of this sentence in official propaganda of the communist times. To see old words and concepts getting new meanings, meanings that would build alternatives to the present mainstream.

It was in the 80ties, the beginning of the eighties, when things were changing, though I kept the idea of men and women being equal, for many years. As if my mind was vaccinated. Maybe because of some bad memory or because of very important social services like day-care for children. Or, Why not combined with the mantra: “Sweden, the most equal country in the world”. This “idea” of the Swedish women as equal made those with other experience even bigger losers. Later, in ‘98, my self-picture definitely had changed and also the idea about Sweden. I felt like no one (really) cared about what I did as an art student. Sad but also like a freedom to do what ever...but I sure DID miss the feeling of being equal and I probably had the longing to get it back...But today it is not so bad... or? /Monica

The Union of Visual Artists was created in Romania in 1950. Of course this was long before my birth and also the existence of this Union was completely unknown and irrelevant to me as a kid, before 1989. But the Union of Visual Artists played some important role in my life as a teenager, after 1989, as long as most of my teachers in art high school and most of my professors at Art Academy were its members. The Union of Visual Artists was officially created as an institution to protect the rights of the artists and also to insure the fact that art is available to everybody, that it is not the avatar of an elite but it is created by and for the common people. This was the official image of the Union. In reality the Union of Artists was an instrument by which the totalitarian regime could control art and artists, by which art was emptied by any authenticity and transformed into mere propaganda. Everybody who wanted to be recognized as an artist had to be part of the Union, this was the only way.

… would be great to have something that protects the artists rights, but what are the rights and who shall become or be considered an artist? We don’t have any “real” Union, but some organisations that fight for better circumstances. Sometimes I meet people who think that artists, in general, are paid by the state ...or that I can make a living my artwork...:-) / Monica

In the 1990’s the members of the Union of Visual Artists were still the ones who were constituting the mainstream in visual arts, still being the ones who received most of the state support. But this slowly changed and now the Union of Visual Artists is just some old, dusty institution, not taken seriously anymore, still having in its property some galleries and some artist studios but without any power on the market of ideas. Of course some artists still want to be members (especially because it is easier to get a studio this way), and some influence of this institution still resides in the fact that many of the art teachers and professors are Union members. In the boring, dusty galleries still belonging to the Union (placed in most of the cities in very central locations) they sell paintings of flowers and orthodox icons. The artists that used to paint at the command of the communist party images of workers and peasants joining hands to build a new world are now doing abstract paintings that are adorning the rooms of office buildings and the houses of the new rich.

How come I get the feeling that both rich and “poor” people in Sweden are more interested in decorative art? But I don’t have anything against beauty.../ Monica

It feels a bit strange to talk so much about the Union of Visual Artists when we try to explain some things about the present Romanian art scene. The Union has no role in it anymore, it is associated completely with a traditionalist, old-fashioned art and now the mainstream is contemporary art in Romania. But the Union of Visual Artists is just an example for words and ideas being misused. It happened that when talking to friends from countries outside the former socialist block, to realise that the Union of Artists means for them something valuable, some ideal that was never completely achieved in their countries. And also, if I read some official indications from the 1950’s about how the role of art should be to express the realities of the common people, about art that should be a mirror of everyday life, I realise that exactly these are the things that I myself think that art should be. And when I think about how precarious my life as an artist is, I think that it would be good to be part of an institution that protects my rights and gives me some sort of economical safety. I think about all these knowing that behind the words was never a reality.

Being part of a Union of Women Artists for example, this has a nice ring to it, isn’t it? Unfortunately, only in English…

In Sweden it would probably be considered as a way to confine (marginalize) women and to confirm the man as norm...and I am still waiting for the exhibition where it’s clearly outspoken that there is only men participating... maybe we could be separated, like in sports…, men’s Nobel prize etc. What if my art does not fit in what the women’s art organisations consider quality? / Monica

But, on the other hand, there are always other words to use. “Friendship”, “informal networks”, “non-hierarchical associations” are less ideologized words and more valuable and useful concepts.

Notes on Timisoara’s cultural institutions

Before 1989, when I was still a child, I knew that to oppose power and the social conventions is dangerous, that it can make you loose the chance to a prosperous life. Even if during communist times the wealth was something that you should hide in order to keep up the appearances of an equal society, still back then, same as now, the wealth, power and prestige were the equivalents of a successful life.

Well... it makes me think about my childhood and my fathe. On our house we had another facade towards the street, a more fancy and expensive one… the successful facade to compensate other failures I suppose…/Monica

The totalitarian regime from before 1989 was really efficient in blocking any attempt for alternative discourses. This is still effective when it comes to the ways in which people perceive the public space, the culture, their civic rights and this makes even more easier the installing of the capitalist domination.

Many people don’t have the courage to talk about things that really matter, to act in order to provoke a change. The change is supposed to be something that comes always from above.

...thinking about the revolution this seems a paradox...probably behavior patterns or something?/ Monica

A few months ago, we started to have meetings together with a few other people representing local alternative cultural initiatives. We knew that a building from Timisoara was supposed to be redirectioned to a cultural purpose and we were thinking to write together a plan for a cultural center that would promote contemporary arts and to apply with this plan to the municipality.

In Timisoara there is no cultural center, and, in general, there are only a few cultural institution for a city that has 350.000 inhabitants and it is an important university center. There is a National Theatre, an Art Museum with an improvised collection and an obscure curatorial program, a public gallery that belongs to the Union of Visual Artists and that mostly sells icons and paintings with flowers, a Philharmonic that functions in the concert hall of the Music High School after it was removed from the space of a cinema. Talking of cinemas, from the nine of them that used to exist before 1989, now only three of them are still functioning, and soon two more will be closed. But a big new cinema just opened inside a huge shopping mall. There is also a Youth Center that has no support from the city and has to rent its spaces for weddings and commercial fairs in order to survive and a Student Center whose building will soon be given back to its former owners that lost it during the communist nationalizations.

Certainly all these institutions have their histories of compromises during the changing regimes, so it is not surprising that it is hard to observe a critical discourse coming from inside them.

Culture and art are seen in an apolitical aura and it is considered to be inappropriate and of bad taste to talk about real life problems, about what is personal and political. To be critical is not “beautiful”.

When we started meeting with the people from alternative cultural initiatives and we started gathering ideas for a possible cultural center we had a good feeling at the beginning. Although we were coming from different backgrounds (visual arts, music, theatre) we were all interested in contemporary strategies. We are all representing some sort of “alternative” cultural scene. Everything went more or less well when we discussed formal and practical things. We all agreed that the center should deal with contemporary art and we had more or less the same taste when it comes to form. The problem occurred when we discussed contents. When we brought into the discussion words like “feminism” or “anti-capitalist discourses”, the problems started. Not for all of them, of course, but still it was strange to see how scared some people can be when it comes to things that can seem too “radical”. “You cannot criticize state policies on the municipality’s money,” one of them told us. Even if municipality’s money is actually our tax money? Then, of course, we got stocked in endless discussions about the importance of feminism and of critical discourses and about the necessity of taking risks. The question about what is relevant to be discussed in a public discourse remained open.

Anyway, the municipality decided to give the building in discussion to the National Theatre. This decision had no connection to our plans of a possibly (hopefully) critical space (as long as this plan was never made official) but instead it was determined by an official letter from the Ministry of Culture, letter recommending the Mayor who should get the space.

Notes on time, money, jobs

Since more than a year I don’t have a constant job that I do only for money. I feel very privileged for that. Before, I used to have for almost seven years a boring and tiresome job. Now, although I work a lot, I am living every day as a vacation. Working most of the time on art projects and doing things that are sometimes routine but that are most of the time interesting and challenging, I don’t consider that I am really “working”, even if sometimes I stay in front of my laptop the entire day, even if sometimes I’m too stressed to eat or sleep, even if sometimes I postpone meeting my friends outside the art world for months and months. Still, I feel so lucky because I can do something creative, something for myself.

This is so great to hear! Like dream come through. I remember reading an article about H.arta before going to Timisoara and it was actually written out that they were working only for money at the same time as they did there art. Nothing strange about that, but why is nobody writing about the Swedish artists situation? I mean, more so the general public could read. Maybe beside the presentation of the artists in the exhibitions!!! (Sorry! Only joking). For me, maybe working only for money has become a habit and I don’t know if I can change it! Though working a little bit less would be nice... But how would I finance that?/ Monica

Most of the time I am waiting for something. Waiting for answers from the financers, waiting for the curator’s reaction, waiting to see what will happen the next month. I am getting used to the constant insecurity and I can take it as being an unavoidable aspect of life. I can even take some pleasure out of this feeling of uncertainty, out of this not belonging to any place, not having a clear status. Like a constant travelling to unknown places.

Sometimes I get so frightened about the future, so panicked that so many things in my life are out of my control. But I think most of the people feel like that many times…

Probably I started with art too late so I don’t have the guts to take big economical risks… have always had some fear, or mad fantasy of ending up without a roof over my head, sleeping on a bench… not the best madness for an artist or is it not a madness any longer… in Sweden?/ Monica

One of the questions Monica asked us was about what did we expect during our art academy years that artist life would be like. We discussed for a while about it, about the myths and the silences, about the inadequacy between the image of the artist created in school and the realities of the life as an artist. Our stories were in many aspects similar. Later, I realised that I forgot to tell her about one aspect, or maybe I mentioned it but without explaining more about it. When art and real life as an adult came into discussion, starting with art high school and then continuing during art academy years, motherhood was always brought up as an issue. Although during the period of more than 10 years of being an art student (in high school and in academy) most of my colleagues were girls, still some sort of embarrassment was associated to my being a girl who studies art and wants to become an artist, some feeling that I am in a place that it is not rightfully mine. Sometimes also some sort of shy and uncertain pride that I am overreaching my condition as a woman and I am entering a male territory. I remember long discussions with my best friend from that time, about the fact that all the “geniuses” from art history were male and about the fact that the few women artists that we knew about did not such a great job. I remember my professor from art academy (a men in his sixties) constantly telling us (a class with a majority of girls) that it is a shame for our work and talent that would be wasted in the moment when we will become mothers. I think I was about16 when I “heroically” decided that I would never be a mother because I want to be an artist (I didn’t like small children too much, anyway).

... well when entering as an art student at the age of 36 I didn’t think about that it could be a conflict being an artists and having children... I felt proud being a woman, knowing about the historical male predominance... though our class was a mix, more or less 50/50…half malse, half females. But after I wasn´t the only one that noticed that we were treaded differently…/ Monica

Of course, now, these are stories that I can tell as jokes about the art education I had received. But on the other hand, if I am thinking about the possibility of becoming a mother and remaining an artist, maybe these stories are not that funny anymore, from a reason that has nothing to do with the “geniuses” from the art history. I can assume for myself the economical insecurity, the constant changes, the impossibility to plan ahead, but would I have the possibility and the right to assume all these for another person depending on me?

At this moment I am taking the precarity of my life as an artist as a more or less fair price that I am paying for the pleasure of doing a diverse, creative work, a work that helps me develop as a person. I rarely think about the possibility of having a child, but when I do, I don’t like the feeling that I have to make a choice.

Timisoara and Stockholm
mai 2008

text written as material for a reading performance in relation to Monica Melin's work Beyond the mission. Postwoman meets h.arta in the frame of the project Consider these policies,WIP: Konsthall, Stockholm

[...]

2008-08-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

[…] is about the things that are considered unimportant and that cannot find their place in the public discourses, about things that cannot find an explicit shape that would fit the dominant patterns, about things that are missing from the text.

[...] is part of the collection of HALFPENNY MUSEUM

www.halfpenny-museum.com

2008

2007-11-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

PROJECT SPACE

www.projectspacebucharest.blogspot.com

www.spatiul-public.ro

Romania transitioned from a totalitarian system, that did not allow any critical debate, to a system in which the right to critically judge the injustices around us is willingly surrendered and in which we seem to consent to another form of domination, one accompanied by the rise of nationalism, racism and sexism (all of which also existed in more concealed forms before 1989 but which are now openly revealed and promoted). These developments took place against the background of an all-encompassing market economy that permeates every aspect of life in Romania.

The events that took place as part of the Project Space brought forward people, attitudes, actions that overcome constraining situations; people who take responsibility and who consider that it is up to them to make a change; different initiatives that have in common their struggle against authority, their willingness to take risks, and their attempt to create the conditions necessary to think differently.

The program of the space will be structured around four modules: post-communism, feminism, education and display.

Post-communism: The events in this module refer to ways of analysing the past and the present while constructing free spaces from where we can influence reality. It is important to clearly show what communism really meant in Romania but it is also important to be conscious of the fact that in many cases, the critique of communism is used to validate conservative, nationalist and sexist positions, and also to claim that the path Romania is on now is the only possible alternative.

Feminism: This module’s events refer to the necessity to shape and publicly declare feminist positions in a context where every aspect of daily life (the mass media, the public and private sphere, etc) is saturated, almost exclusively, by stereotypical images of women: the self-sacrificing woman; the devoted wife and mother; the sexual object; the victim. This is a reflection of a culture and society dominated by a heterosexual male view that refuses to acknowledge any other perspective.

Education: The events in this module try to conceive a type of education that would not be based on competition but on collaboration, where the sharing of knowledge would not be hierarchical, and where learning strategies would generate new ways of perceiving and constructing our reality.

Display: The events from this module reveal ways in which dominant ideologies become manifest in the public space (in the city, in the media, in institutional organization and their public image) and also ways in which pockets of resistance to the dominant discourse are created, spaces where people can exercise their right to question and think critically, places where the possibility to choose differently remains open.

The presentations, discussions, workshops, performances that took place at Project Space tackled at least one of these four subjects.

Project Space is part of the project Spatiul Public Bucuresti/ Public Art Bucharest 2007, curated by Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch (www.spatiul-public.ro)

2007-11-06T07:18:00.002-08:00

2008

2008 (published by IDEA Publishing House Cluj and Walther Konig Koln edited by Marius Babias and Sabine Hentsch) is a weekly diary, a practical object that people can use in their everyday life and which contains, in relation to some days of the year, texts and images commenting an event from the Romanian recent history, events that are showing the histories of the excluded and marginal ones, events that are showing the injustices of the dominant but that are also showing examples of resistance to the dominant. The notebook that has a limited time to be used (the period of one year) is a signal for the fact that history needs to be constantly rewritten. Also, the fact that the book is a practical object that you can use daily, your own handwriting intermingling and overlapping with the historical facts is some sort of constant demonstration that history is always here, shaping the present.

Being Afraid and Being Yourself

2007-11-06T07:18:00.001-08:00

Poster with a text by Liviu Pop in the frame of the project Land of human rights by Rotor, Graz.

http://www.landofhumanrights.eu/eng/project/index.html

http://www.landofhumanrights.eu/de/projekt/graz/posterkampagne01/posters/h.arta-group.html

Being Afraid and Being Yourself

By Liviu Pop

Very often the unknown is instinctively perceived as evil. Minorities are often victims of this mental association simply because their differences are away from what we are used to and what we know. The way we acquire knowledge is finding the similarities with something already familiar and the small differences of the new situation. Sometimes these new differences bring fear if not understood properly.

A few hours before the Gay Pride parade, which took place in Bucharest on July 9, 2007, another parade marched through the streets of the city, one in which people who were afraid of the unknown were exhibiting their so called moral standards. One cannot ignore that in the name of a religion that promotes love among all human beings, they refused the humanity of those who weren’t similar to them. The relation between the ones protesting against the Gay Pride Parade and the church was obvious: religious icons and slogans like "We are orthodox. Romania is not Sodom" were carried by the protesters. Even more, orthodox priests wearing the cross and religious icons were praying and marching aside the crowd. The representatives of the high hierarchy of the Orthodox Church publicly announced that they will "pray for the return to normality" of the sexual minorities.

The small difference regarding sexual lifestyle was enough for the Christians to perceive gay and lesbian people as totally different from them. It is ironic that this comes from a religion which started out as a minority and faced the same reactions from the majority of those times.

The violence that took place a few hours later, against the participants of the Gay Pride march was entitled by the same “Christian moral standards” exhibited by the anti-gay protesters and by the public affirmations of the Orthodox Church representatives.

One of the arguments against the civil marriage of gay couples is that they shouldn’t have special rights. It’s obvious that they are not asking for special rights, but for the same rights that the majority has. We are living in a secular state in which the religious laws are not binding for society. And they are not asking for the Orthodox Church’s approval, they are asking for civil rights.

2007-04-28T05:11:00.001-07:00

Via Vita/ Via Vita II

Two examples :

1. In Timisoara there is a Museum of the Roads, maintained by the Regional Office for Roads and Bridges, a museum which has the same exhibits and looks in the same way as during the communist period. Although immediately after 1989 the portraits of Ceausescu were removed from every public institution, here, in this museum, they were kept exactly as they were. Alongside with the statistics about the performances in the production plan and the photographs with Ceausescu giving advice to the workers, there are also exhibited pictures from the parties of the company employees, from the choirs, shows and sport competitions, albums with poems and drawings made by the employees.

2. Following a protocol between the City Council and Iulius Mall Timisoara, starting with 25 May 2006 all civil marriages in the city are officiated at the Iulius Mall. From now on, if one wants to have a legal marriage in Timisoara, one has to have it in a huge mall (they say it’s the second in size in Europe), amongst shops and advertising. Every Saturday, one can see tens of groups of wedding participants who are mounting the steps of the mall as in a sort of temple.
Via Vita and Via Vita II are two videos which are documenting the way in which dominant ideologies – communism and capitalism – are confiscating private life, turning it into a symbolic capital which legitimates them.

2007, Protokoll gallery , Cluj

2007-04-27T12:39:00.001-07:00

Before and After

H.arta group’s project Before and after consists of four pieces: a documentary video showing the moments around the discourse of Timisoara’s mayor from the New Year’s Eve with the occasion of Romania joining the EU and three individual comments about the ways in which the past and our newly achieved position are constructing our identity.

Maria Crista’s work Back to Vienna is revisiting the project What would you do in my place in Vienna?, a project that the three artists realized in Vienna, in 2003, during a one month residency. The project was about asking friends and collaborators from Timisoara what would they like to do if they stayed for a month in Vienna. The artist performed these requests and sent back home postcards with the documentation of them. These wishes, as some slides from a
dreamed world, were specific for a certain way of viewing the western countries as idyllic and faraway countries. The work Back to Vienna consists in a text explaining the past longing for an idealized place, text written on the back of one of the postcards used in the project What would you do in my place in Vienna?. Between the reused image and the newly written text there is a tension created between an imagined and an existing world.Anca Gyemant’s work I don’t know how to explain…consists in a video projection of a text explaining the dilemmas of objectively relating to Romania’s communist past where the leftist ideas were tragically misused during Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime. This rethinking of what communism really was has different nuances and implications according to where it is done, in Romania or abroad.
Condemning communism outside Romania can be misunderstood and taken as a condemnation of the leftist ideas in general, while declaring yourself as leftist in Romania can be misunderstood as an ignorance of what communism really was. Sliding around these different roles and the continuous need to explain is part of some kind of “eastern European artist” identity, label that is so necessary and in the same time so complicated to avoid. The flowing of the text in the video
projection is from time to time interrupted by short sequences showing advertisements of the new EU member Romania, which are displayed on billboards in Vienna.

I don't know how to explain...

Rodica Tache’s work Magic is an ironical comment towards the mechanisms that made possible the transformation of the totalitarian Romania in the newly joined EU member. Most people from Romania experienced the changes in 1989 as an almost “magic” outcome, seeing this change as due more to the will of god than as a result of political interest. Now Romania is taking part to the present spectacle, showing the merging of one ideology into another.

The video Before and after is a recording of the festivities taking place in the Opera Square in Timisoara (the same place where the events in ’89 took place), festivities that marked the moment of Romania joining the EU. The mayor is also aware of the historical relevance of the place, constantly using the rhetoric of the Revolution in his discourse and stating that the dream for which people died in ’89 is now finally fulfilled by Romania joining EU. The recordings are taken from the confused standpoint of the regular citizen, without the glorifying views of television broadcastings and without the constructed greatness of a historical moment.

Art point Gallery, Vienna, 2007

2007-04-27T12:38:00.001-07:00

About us (and) the others

On the street, a little girl answering to the jokes of her mother's friend and explaining that her skin is so dark because she has just returned from the seaside, but she is not at all a gipsy. The look in the customs officer's eyes when he asks for your passport. Words accidentally heard on the street: "You stupid Jew…". The pride that you feel in a sunny morning when someone tells you how beautiful your town is. The need to explain that things are never black or white,
that they are always more than that. That nothing is absolutely “true”. The portraits displayed in the classrooms, especially in the Romanian and History departments, portraits that represent only men, long lines of serious, solemn men that the history and culture of the nation are built on. “When more than two women are gathering the devil sticks in his tail, too.” The way you see your country in a different light when you are travelling abroad. Our country with high mountains and with the sea and with broad plains that the clouds are projecting there shadows on, with old and nostalgic cities and with people that are speaking plainly. Our country with grey cities and with people that, when they are condemning others, when they say that the ones who are different should disappear, they are not even conscious that they are saying something
wrong. Our history full of heroes that protected the Christianity from the pagan invaders, our history of Christian and orthodox nation that gives us the right to judge the ones that are not Christians. The shame to be Romanians or to speak Romanian of some people, when they are travelling abroad. An artist asking us insistently if it will be very difficult to us to go back home, after we have lived for a month in a place so western, so beautiful and civilised. The anger that you feel when you see the ignorance and the injustice around you. The need to say clearly that some things are not “natural” but they have to be discussed and they have to become subject to negotiation.

The book "About us (and) the others" contains all the contradictory things that we see everyday and which are significant for the ways we construct our identity: examples of tolerance or of intolerance, examples for the ways you can feel at home in your country or, on the contrary, examples for the moments you feel excluded or willing to exclude yourself, examples for the ways we look at the others and for the ways we are looked at.

Eduard Constantin, Stefan Constantinescu, Ulf Eriksson&Gerhard Blum, Catalin Gheorghe, Felice Hapetzeder, Karl Holmqvist, Cezar Lãzãrescu, Johan Lundh, Nita Mocanu, Vlad Morariu, Ylva Ogland, Raluca Voinea and h.arta in interview with: Gerd Aurell, Stefan Constantinescu, Ulf Eriksson & Gerhard Blum, Ludwig Franzen, Emma- Lina Ericson & Moa Krestesen, Felice Hapetzeder, Anders Jansson, Maja- Lena Johansson, Magnus Liistamo, Anna-Lena Lundmark,
Dorinel Marc, Paula von Seth

edited by h.arta

2006

2007-04-27T12:37:00.001-07:00

About art and the ways we look at the world

Despre arta si felurile in care privim lumea

"Receiving in a personal manner the artistic message from the visual universe.
Competence: Highlight the plastic language elements and their inter-connections,
with the purpose of interpreting bi- and tri-dimensional artistic images –
drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures and architecture.
Contents: morphology and syntax of the bi- and tri-dimensional image;
specific means: drawing; value harmony and contrast; colour harmony and
contrast; suggestions for material choice.
Competence: Analyse the way time and space are represented in the bi- and
tri-dimensional image
Contents: artistic composition structures: classical and romantic, static and
dynamic;
Competence: Plastic analysis, through personal interpretation, of bi- and
tri-dimensional works of art from the local artistic heritage
Contents: analyse bi- and tri-dimensional images (a drawing, a painting, a
statuary or architectural monument, an indoor sculpture, an outdoor statue,
on a street or in a park, a church and a city hall).”

(Ministry of Education, Research and Youth, National Curriculum Council –School curriculum for grades 9 and 10, junior high-school, plastic education)

These are the official indications about how to explain to 15 and 16-year-olds what art is and what its roles are, the law explaining to the teachers how to provide their pupils with "the universal key for decoding any image" . Once one knows the formal laws of producing artwork, if one knows how to recognize a contrast or how to discern between closed and open compositions,
one automatically understands the message as well. A phtotgraph of Joseph Kosuth's "One and Three Chairs" is printed in the ambient design chapter in one of the 10PthP grade schoolbooks.
High-school pupils are taught, generation after generation, that art is mainly a matter of technique, a domain in which, if one studies with reverence and attention the great masterpieces, one acquires knowledge about "accepting values form the universal heritage of plastic arts" and develops "a taste for the beautiful".
This vision, presenting art as a combination of traditional techniques and abstract symbols, undermines its place in society, causes it to be perceived, and therefore to become, a useless thing, pure decoration that does nothing to change our lives.
Young people continue to be educated in the spirit of the old totalitarian methods, which tried to separate art and culture from real life, so that they would lose their essential justification, lose the real reason for their necessity: their status as a realm of freedom, where reality is analysed critically, their status as an instrument that helps us be equal and able to listen to each other.

After graduation from the faculty of arts, one wonders what to do next, in a confusing context where the artist's status is, for various reasons, an awkward one. Whatever one says is not taken seriously, because artists are "dreamers", living in their own world; on the other hand, if what one says is too serious, it is no longer art, because art should always talk about "beautiful"
things. This being the situation, we ask ourselves what could break this logical chain. Maybe proposing a different point of view would change something, however little.

As a contribution to Periferic biennial, section Social Processes, curated by Marius Babias and Angelika Nollert, we have written an art schoolbook as we would like it to exist. A schoolbook that wouldn’t just teach its readers more things about art, but which would make them wishing to be better persons, more tolerant and open minded, wishing to live in a better society.
We structured the book around the different purposes that art can serve:
1. speak about our lives, make us recognise ourselves in it
2. induce dialogue and sociability
3. reconsider the notions we take for granted, question the culture we
usually consider immutable and sheltered from any doubt
4. help us accept/understand those around us
5. change our viewing angle, make us aware that there are many positions
from which to know a thing and that there is no transcendental and
atemporal truth
6. attract attention on problems, give a voice to the excluded ones
7. effectively solve problems in society
to each of these purposes relating a certain topic: everyday life, collaborative
projects, institutional critique, feminism, multiculturalism, political art,
art for social change.
For each of the chapters we have made a different poster using one question related to topics discussed in the text and an image from the Romanian context.

May 2006, Periferic Biennial/ “Social Processes”, curated by Marius Babias
and Angelika Nollert

2007-04-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

How did you decide to become an artist?

www.cummamhotaratsadevinartist.blogspot.com

In July 2005, during our residency at Iaspis, in Stockholm, we interviewed artists there and collected their answers to the question How did you decide to become an artist?. This project that we did in Stockholm, in a context that is so different from ours, had its starting point and its motivation closely linked to the circumstances in Romania, linked to the fact that it is so difficult to construct our identity as an artist in our country, linked to our work at h.arta space (work which is about this need to find a possible “definition” to our situation as artists in Romania, need to understand our context and react in a constructive way to it).
In October 2005 we had a presentation at Vector gallery in Iasi, where we talk about our work at h.arta and where we proposed to the interested art students to participate in the project How did you decide to become an artist?. The next days, during a week, we have met these students in different places, which they choused, in coffee shops, in parks, in their studios and we took the
interviews. There were 13 students participating (Alexandra Andriescu, Madalina Bancila, Lavinia German, Alexandru Grigoras, Ioan Ene, Andreea Nasoi, Oana Nicuta, Eugen Pop, Bianca Simionescu, Adrian Stoleriu, Mihaela Stirbu, Oana Toderica, Bogdan Vatavu) and we discussed about the art education system, about our expectations as artists, about the ways art and
artists are seen in the society, about the things that our parents and teachers told us about art, about the stereotypes associated with art, about how we see our future as artists. We edited their very interesting, useful and sincere answers in a text named How did you decide to becomean artist? - a story in seven chapters. This text, published in “Suplimentul de cultura” and as insert in “Idea arts+society” magazine was part of our contribution at Periferic 7, section Social Processes, curated by Marius Babias and Angelika Nollert.

October 2005, Iasi, Romania
media intervention, published in Suplimentul de cultura nr. 62, 4-10. o2. 2006, pp 10-12 and as an insert in Idea nr. 23/2006

2007-04-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

How did you decide to become an artist?

The project How did you decide to become an artist? consists in interviewing artists and collecting their answers to this very general and in the same time very personal question. Listening to the people's stories around their decision to become artists is not just a mean to find out about the actual circumstances and about their intimate convictions, hopes and reasons, but also a way to discuss more general issues about art, about art education, about the expectancies that people have of art and artists, etc.

How did you decide to become an artist is an ongoing project.
Video project, started in July 2005

How did you decide to become an artist?
(a few excerpts from the interviews)

”I had these interests in society, in political issues (...) but it was never connected to art. Then, after I got into Academy (...) painting felt more and more like it wasn't enough. Slowly, I quit painting and started working with other methods and also brought in, of course, my interest in other questions. Then, more and more, I started to see art as a place where you can investigate and discuss different issues and do this from different points of view.”
Johan Tiren

“As an artist, I’ve done, I think, almost everything that I was scared to do as a journalist. (…) When I was younger the thing that made me most mad was the fact that you could live in a society and have a sensation of self, a sensation of dignity as a person, but that the same society could treat that kind of self or integrity as nothing. It didn’t only happen to me (…) but I also saw it around me.”
Pal Hollender

“It took me like four years, when I started in art school, to understand what the job was about and I didn’t know, but, I think that now I know what this job to be an artist is about and I really like it and I feel very, very lucky. It’s like I’ve finally found what I was looking for when I was traveling around, pretending to be a drifter. That wasn’t for real, but this is for real and I’m very happy when I work on my projects. “
Bo Melin

“I’ve just met people that helped me, people that gave me all kind of information and stories and made it easier for me to find a way to define myself as a storyteller. Because this is what I actually am and this is my role as an artist: to tell stories that have a connection to me and that reflect the reality around me.”
Stefan Constantinescu

“I never saw so clear the limit between being an artist or not. Maybe I have been aware that I am an artist at the moment I got to do things that were very big and amazing for me and I was aware that I am doing those things because I am an artist, otherwise I would have never been allowed to do them.”
Lara Almarcegui

“And then I was at the Academy for five years and it was a funny experience to see all these people that want to become artists, and these professors that are artists, and one starts to realize that it's kind of vague the whole thing: what is an artist, what kind of artist, who is an artist, who is a real artist and all of these things.”
Rodrigo Mallea Lira

“I had this very naive image of the artist like this avant-garde type that is outside the society. I didn't like that image; I didn't want to be an artist in that sense. Even though I quit my education with physical planning and started to try out this art school thing, I didn't like the artist role, so I didn't want to become an artist. But with my first piece, I saw the opening for the art solving problems in the society or being part of the society.”
Per Hasselberg

“I had this very romantic idea about what it meant to be an artist and this was linked with a very strong feeling I had that life is absurd and that I have to find out what it is about, otherwise I am not interested in living.”
Loulou Cherinet

“I was very political during that time, very socialistic, and it was this kind of idea that it was too egoistic idea to become an artist. So, that was the reason why I wanted to become a teacher. (...) Of course, what I thought then what an artist was is very different from today. I think there are different steps to take in becoming an artist. It took at least ten years before I could call myself an artist, have the identity of an artist, say, " I am an artist.”
Matts Leiderstam

“I was in a very beautiful landscape, wondering about beauty and harmony and the contrast within contemporary everyday life and the tension of the desire of finding more harmonical ways of living or being (for some people at least). So, I thought that I was going to study about beauty.”
Monica Giron

“Maybe, in a sense, the fact that I wanted to be into art, to be part of that machinery, came from the longing of not being alone anymore.”
Henrik Andersson

“I think it is a very personal question, (…) it had something to do with dealing with my problems, definitely. I see this still as a way of dealing with society, of dealing with reality and that is helping, first of all myself, to go through life. (…) Even if I’m known as a critical, political artist, it is definitely a very selfish decision, because I do have something to say, but, first of all, I’m saying it to myself and than I’m seeing if somebody else is listening.”
Marcel Odenbach

“It is really double this thing about wanting to become an artist. In a way it is something that I had to do, it's almost like I didn't have a choice, I had to try it on, but in the same time the idea of being an artist didn't really exist in the place where I came from. (...) You are raised in a way that you should do some useful things and, of course, we can all agree on that art is something very important in the society but still it is not as important as if you do other things. So, for me this was and it still is very strong, this feeling of being a little bit ashamed for being an artist and this is so weird. (...) This is why I think I have to really make an effort for what I am doing, because otherwise I would be so ashamed. I think this is not just something that I personally have but, maybe, Swedish people in general have it.”
Johanna Billing

“I wasn’t in an art school, I was in the University doing something called cultural studies, so I wasn't supposed to become an artist, but there, as well, I used the possibilities. I had the possibilities to go on from that point, to work as an artist. I understood that more as a description for the possibilities of how you work and how you live and how you bring that together in a more or less concentrated form.”
Bernd Krauss

“I didn’t really decide to be an artist and I think there were probably other things that I could do and be happy, but I really think that making art is the most interesting thing because to some extent it incorporates everything else that I’m interested in.”
Andrea Zittel

“It seems that the art context still has this sort of freedom that isn’t so much bounded to economy. Artists are not perceived as somebody who necessarily has to create a profit. And I think that the gap in the whole capitalist production which exists within art platform is very, very important. Artists should be more aware about that gap, that it is a positive gap, that we can produce ideas that doesn’t necessarily lead to immediate profit.”
Apolonija Sustersic “

"(…) when I was sixteen, I stumbled over a picture of an art piece made by Ojvind Fahlstrom, the Swedish artist. He had made two oval signs, one saying ESSO and the other saying LSD. They were made in plastic, like the ESSO sign. I totally did not understand it, but I also totally got it, it seemed like crystal clear to me and it was in a way an eye opener, in the same way, I assumed, drugs could be, perhaps. It was clarifying but unbelievable, I wasn’t able to grasp it and that was interesting and a bit frightening. “
Jens Fange

”You get the feeling that things are in a way that you didn't think they were, and you discover that, and then you start to question what is right and what is wrong, I mean they could both be right and in that case who decides these things and what about your own choice?”
Markus Degerman

2007-04-27T11:02:00.000-07:00

Painting our way through culture

H.arta, the alternative space we are running, needs every year an accountantreport. H.arta is a very small institution and has no budget, so we cannot afford to pay an accountant. Every year we are asking an accountant we know to help us with the paper work without being paid and she is very nice and helps us each time. This video shows us preparing a gift for her, a painting with flowers (her favorite kind of image). The painting is an approximate copy of a Monet canvas, with lots of yellow sunflowers and a blue sky and it is the subject of one of the stories about the ways we have to improvise in order to sustain h.arta. And the painting is, of course, a symbol of our “skills and knowledge”, of the things we were trained for as artists, a symbol of what is expected of us.

video, 5’, 2005

2007-04-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

Brend

We read a text called Art or Brend? written by Henry Flynt in 1968. The text is about some utopical alternative to art, alternative, that consist in the simple things you do for the mere pleasure they cause you, things that you don’t usually pay much attention to and that you don’t value especially. These things that can be anything (fluffy pajamas or watching out he window or…anything) are called in the text „your brend”. We found it interesting and useful to organize
meetings and discussions using the brend as a starting point, as a pretext. We chose it as a reason for meetings because we feel that we need to relate to art in a less pretentious and rigid way and to have a simpler and more authentical attitude towards what we can do as artists. So we asked our friends and collaborators what their brend is and for a few days we met at H.arta and we talk about what we consider as being art and how can we work together.
The brend is of course just a game, but we hope it to be a starting point for some interesting discussions. We transformed partially the space, trying to make it really comfortable and appropriate to spend more time in it (with big armchairs and colorful walls), while the rest of the space stays rough. We are also working on a book with images and texts in which the participants to the project (students and young artists) are explaining their brend.

November 2003 discussions at H.arta space
September 2004- discussions and exhibition at KF Arad

2007-04-26T03:27:00.000-07:00

What would you do in my place in Vienna?

We asked this question to 38 people – our friends and co-workers - and we recorded their answers that reflect their views about a place they know only in a mediated way, but which is more or less physically inaccessible to them. We tried to realize the actions they asked us to do in Vienna and symbolically fulfilling their wishes. We documented these actions and we have sent postcards of these actions to their initiators.

The people we have interviewed are associated to the projects of the contemporary art space h.arta, in Timisoara (Romania), a space run by our group. The majority of the people who gave us their answers travelled very little outside Romania and have never been to Vienna. Even for the ones who visited Vienna before, this wasn’t something they would do on a regular basis, but it was a kind of exceptional event. Although borders are open for Romanian citizens, the economic conditions make travelling very difficult. All of their answers – the playful ones as well as the more serious ones – reflect the fact that they see the West only as a space they could encounter as tourists and not as an environment where they could perform professionally. Just to be here, to stay in this hardly accessible place seems to be enough.

What would you do in my place in Vienna? is a project that is mediating the ideas of pleasure, communications, and comparisons connected to the traveling from one (art) context to another one.

1-30th of June 2003, residence in Vienna offered by A9 Transeuropa
(Museums Quartier); the project was presented in our room, inside Museums Quartier

2007-04-26T03:20:00.000-07:00

Mapping h.arta

According to Brian O’Doherty the characteristics of relationship between gallery and public can be extracted also from analyzing the typical representation of the spectator in installation photographs. O’Doherty talks about photos in which the visitor is always seen from behind, alone, photos in which his/her attitude is a special one, adequate only to this isolated space and in the same time different to his/her daily gestures and attitudes. In the h.arta documentary photos, exhibitions have always been presented in relation to the public, who is an active participant and not a lifeless object which is part of the display. In these pictures, people talk, listen to each other, go through info materials, drink coffee, watch videotapes, ask questions, discuss the works, etc. The most important thing that can be extracted from these pictures, the truly essential quality captured in them consists in people’s gestures, in the way in which these gestures interact with each other, beyond the space which hosted them, beyond the exhibitions which were nothing but a pretext to these gestures. Because of all these only the images of those people have been preserved in the work, people who actually visited the gallery, their presence being the essential element for h.arta.

2003, The Last East European Show, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade

H.ARTA SPACE

2007-04-26T03:15:00.000-07:00

After h.arta

When h.arta is empty it gives you the feeling that it is a space of yet unfulfilled hopes and expectations.
h.arta is the name of the alternative space that we are running in Timisoara. It has 350 m2 and it is located at the second floor of a former industrial hall (a building from the 1980’s). It is a large, white space, with many windows and a lot of light, with no furniture, no computer, no telephone (we are borrowing all that for each project). Many times, it was just an empty space (from different reasons, but especially because of the scarce founding). But, sometimes, h.arta is alive and important and full of people and ideas, when our public and us are there working on a project. It is the place to which our hopes are connected, our hopes to understand our context, our hopes to establish the so needed connections to the others, our hopes to finally find out which are the right questions and to get to meaningful answers.

This was a short text about h.arta that we have written in 2002, and we have chosen to quote it here as an example of the way we always related to h.arta space, in a personal and emotional way. Working at h.arta as organisers, curators, pr responsibles, technical advisers, caterers, cleaners, etc was mainly about hope and trust and friendship and taking energy from the closeness with the others.

We started to work at h.arta soon after we finished our education. From the very beginning, the main purpose seemed to be to have h.arta as a place where we could finally discover what art is really about and what are the ways in which regular, everyday life could enter the field of art that we were always taught to be just a realm of distant and high ideas. We wanted to have h.arta as a meeting place, a place where we could talk about art not as something abstract, general and distant but as something that have a real connection to our lives. A place where we can consider that art leys in simple, normal, everyday things, in the real interests, feelings and ideas of people involved in it. We were trying to redefine art from this perspective, to talk about it in a way that would be different from the modernistic discourse about high art that was taught to us in the course of our entire education. This was the political content behind this simple operation of declaring the private, the emotional, the trivial and the everyday as a rightful part of a public discourse, as something worthy of being the content of art.

In order to do that, in order to reshape the things that we used to know about art and about its possible purposes, we used h.arta space as a tool for learning, as a motivation to read and get informed, as a way to meet people who could show us different perspectives, as an everyday practice of working collaboratively and constantly trying to find the most democratical ways of taking decisions and making things done.

From the beginning of 2007, h.arta as a physical space doesn’t exist anymore. But h.arta projects are continuing in other spaces and other formats.

h.arta group

Priveste-ma asa cum sunt. Cuvinte si imagini ale femeilor rome Dikh man kadă sar sem. Lava aj dikimata le rromnenqe See me as I am. Words and images of Roma women

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A conversation between h.arta and Kontekst

A text by h.arta with comments by Monica Melin

[...]

Being Afraid and Being Yourself

Being Afraid and Being Yourself

H.ARTA SPACE

Priveste-ma asa cum sunt. Cuvinte si imagini ale femeilor rome
Dikh man kadă sar sem. Lava aj dikimata le rromnenqe
See me as I am. Words and images of Roma women