Reconstructions_Danube

Reconstructions investigate, through photography, the problem of time and of memory, the way in which we can forget and remember. The Reconstructions are poly-perspectival compound images in which each constitutive photo acts like an information-and-memory bit. The fact that these snapshots are taken of more or less the same place, yet at different times (after some minutes, days, months, years), conferring on the final image a spatial coherence and a temporal discontinuity. The whole ensemble aims to reconstruct certain contexts and personal experiences that played out in the past in order to create some puzzles which can sometimes break qua “time windows” pointing to other horizons. In 2005 I was invited to participate in an exhibition organized by the Technisches Museum Wien. The title was “Blue Inventing the River Danube”. For one year, I traveled and photographed from a contemporary perspective several places that were documented in the 19th and early 20th Century and are in the archive of the museum. My visits included the former shipyard on the island of Obuda / Sziget in Budapest, and the Romanian towns Orsova, Turnu Severin, Braila, Galati. In the same year I photographed inside and on the top of the new office buildings in Donaustadt / Wien. In 2011 I was in Belgrade at a symposium on Contemporary art and politics in the Balkans, organized by UNESCO and ended with a cruise on the Danube, attended by several presidents and ministers from the region. Besides these, on other occasions, I have held various documentary sessions, along the Danube in Romania, which have been included in the ample RO_Archive photographic project. In 2015 I initiated a project (D_Platform) with support from the Ministry of Education in Romania. It was a cooperation between artists working with photography, landscape architects, anthropologists, philosophers, and writers. In this folder, there are only a few reconstructions realized during some of the above-mentioned documentary trips.