Essay and project inspired by Biennale di Venezia 2014: Curated subject of how in the past 100 years nationalism

was lost inspires a research into the impressive influence of Romania’s last 100 years on Romanians.

R O4 0 - 2 5 - 6 5 - 1 0 0

„(...)how we got from here to there...”I PACKED MY BAG AND IN IT I PUT...*

...I packed my bag and in it I put all that I could carry on a flight back home. Upon my arrival I found out that my bag got

lost on the way.I lost everything I had decided to take with me on a deserted island.

RE-LOCATEACCUMULATION FETISH AS FUNDAMENT

Manifesto: Fundamental is not the concept or the process but the accumulation fromwhich these two are born.

Abstract: In an academic exercise to understand communities that are dealing withextreme poverty, students are encouraged to take photographs of the interiors of theshelters and to list an inventory of the objects they find. From this inventory students can later approximate for how long the owner has been living on the streets and the number of re-locations he went through. The first time an individual is evicted, he tends to carry with him as many possessions from his former home as possible. These objects are usually placed inside the temporary shelter in accordance to the way they were placed in the abandoned house. The illegal shelter may provide housing for a few months or years, but as soon as it’s discovered by the police, its owner is forced to leave and search for a new place. At his second re-location, the individual is going to own and take with him less objects than he did previously. The inventory is going to decrease with every forced re-location.

40 During a time period of 40 years Romanians were forced to re-locate due to the politics regarding the urban planning of the time. Many families have been moved more than once. This re-location implied in most cases that a person had little time to gather any possessions and move to the new location. It also implied most of the times a lifestyle change. In this aspect, many home owners, raising crops and farm animals had to move to apartment buildings. Animals and crops were abandoned. Many objects were left behind for they couldn’t be carried and wouldn’t fit in the new space anyway.

40+25 For the past 25 years the tendency was to strive to move out of the late regime’s apartment units. Economy and globalization influenced the Romanian society in such a way that today 1 out of 6 people works abroad.

100 Romanians are still influenced by re-location. As a group they were forced to chose from their inventory the possessions they would carry with them. They had to decide what to abandon as they moved in order to travel lightly.

The fundamentals of Romanian society (influencing and) influenced by architecture for the past 100 years are listed in the accumulation of possessions people had to save and move. Globalization influences people to travel lightly. This is the story of how we start a journey with a luggage that we later consume and abandon in order to keep moving: how we got from here to there (although Zeno’s paradox might state that we were just standing the whole time).

Exhibition Description:(Drawings and plans shown are independent of location)

We propose a narrative. The story starts with a small container filled with objects that seem to belong to someone. It contains memories and worthless objects along useful ones. The container is full and too small for the amount of objects gathered. For this reason the objects are piled up and stacked. The visitor steps into the next container. This second contain-er has less objects than the first. Most of them have well established functions and very little of them are decor. The next room is even lighter. In the third container all useless objects disappear and a small inventory of ob-jects can be listed. The last container is nearly empty. It has only the most functional objects that a human can extract from the first room’s inventory. Standing inside the fourth container you are not able to imagine what lies in the first room, but inside the first room you can think about the combination of objects that lies in the fourth container as well as many other possibilities. The accumulation of objects and in-formation inside the first room is the fundamental from which concepts are developed. The conceptual process will always perform a reductive action upon the funda-mental that started it.

Then, we propose a game. While the visitor steps out of the narrative, he en-counters a large stack of objects. He is encouraged to pick from this pile the ob-jects he would carry with him in a similar process as that described earlier. Carrying these objects, becoming con-scious of their weight and shape, he enters the second pavilion. Here he would have to move from one room to the other with as many objects as he wants to carry. Every opening between containers inside the second pavilion is shaped so as to create obstacles that would stop visitors from carrying objects from one container to the other. Visitors would have to abandon objects on the way. Each end of the day is going to give document-able insights about how people choose and handle objects.

Strategy details: All the objects used in the exhibition are going to be gathered in a public auction, therefore they exist in reality as well as in the virtual space. The objects respect a preset inventory. Their functionality, the way they appear and disappear inside the containers was decided by running a public survey and asking people to grade how they feel about this objects importance.

Laura Dumitrescu, Marjan Mostavi, Dragos Mila, Mircea Mihai, Veronica Popescu

Thank you!