Bucharest Deconstructed

Bucharest seems to lie on some fault lines, in a fluidity both spatial and temporal, floating between an unprocessed past and an uncertain future in the edge lands of Europe. Twenty-six years after the violent fall of Ceaușescu, deconstruction is manifest but the outcome of a story whose old logics are dissolving and of a present full of uncertainties remains volatile. A process of simultaneous modernization and decay is taking place. It isn't easy to discard decades of the cruelest dictatorship and its traces are still ubiquitous. The notorious “Securitate” might officially not exist anymore; its shadows remain on the faces of the destitute elderly. These images are on the borderline between chronicle and fiction. None of them is staged however reality is mainly a pretext to construct metaphors of a state of mind. This series is also about time, about inevitable endings, about what is fading — but also what is yet to fade. It is about shadows that trace invisible, blurred, and oblique lines and borders. In a derelict department store that used to be the showcase of communist prosperity, the plastic ghost of Nadia Comaneci stares at the peeling walls while, at the other end of the city, a shy stuffed baby bear bears the company of the holy virgin. In between bittersweet nothings happen and, openings, prospects, reflections, disguises are intersecting and answering one another. Elsewhere nevertheless, a young couple’s tenderness glows in the greyness. Hope is sometimes the thin reverse of desperation. Sadly, the last frontier may be the passing away of the old generations whose suffering and disillusions project an immensely sorrowful silence. “Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true.” -Rhinoceros, Eugène Ionesco