română/
tranzit.org/

tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

Online Generation

Text Information/
Picture Gallery/

Artists: Andrea Faciu, Ionuţ Toma & Şah Club Corod and Constantin Răileanu

Opening: Wednesday, 9 December 2015, 7 p.m.
tranzit. ro/ Iași, Al. Lăpușneanu St. 7-9

Public debate with the participation of Mihaela Dimitriu and Anca Sâiu (Salvaţi Copiii Iaşi), as well as of Ştefan Cojocaru, PhD (professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social and Political Sciences, Social Work and Sociology Department, “Al.I.Cuza" University, Iaşi)

Curator: Florin Bobu, Assistant curator: Delia Bulgaru
Exhibition design: Florin Bobu & Andrei Pripasu

The exhibition will be open between 9 December 2015 and 20 January 2016, Mondays to Fridays, between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Despite its longstanding presence in the media, the issue of Romanian children whose parents work abroad still arouses strong and contradictory feelings among the general public, making a critical positioning in relation to the topic more difficult.

The exhibition will present three projects, by three very different artists, whose interests converged towards a common focal point: a certain type of political sensitivity in relation to this social issue.

The work Cradle Count by Andrea Faciu was produced partially in Iaşi, in 2013. The space-sound installation, as the artist calls it, consists of a jukebox on which we can play any of the sound pieces made for this project with the participation of children attending the programme "Creştem împreună" ("Growing together") run by Save the Children Iaşi. "Similar to a heart or to a pacemaker, the jukebox – a desire-fulfilling machine – interacts with the audience, to whom it gives the option to choose. […] Cradle Count symbolizes a social structure in which, through the use of this machine, replacement is always allowed. Any lost, scratched or less popular record can be replaced with another." (Andrea Faciu, 2013).

In 2013 we started a collaboration with the artist George Doroş, whose project within the rural environment, Şah Club Corod (Corod Chess Club) , extended into 2015 through the invitation made to the artist Ionuţ Toma to create a site-specific project in the township of Corod, Galaţi county. His proposal, En Passant - Spaţiu concept şi serie unică de mobilier (En Passant - Concept space and single-series furniture) was a project in which various artistic interests intersected with those of a rural community. Ionuţ Toma focused on creating a space dedicated exclusively to chess for the children of this township. Some of the furniture pieces he designed for this space will be presented in the current exhibition, on the one hand allowing us to use them according to their designed function, and on the other hand challenging our ideological positioning in relation to the rural environment from the perspective of a university centre like Iaşi.

The exhibition is accompanied by a documentation reuniting the resources available online on November 2015. The keywords used during search were: copii (children), părinţi (parents), străinătate (abroad). The results were filtered according to the year the documents were published in the interval 2005-2015. Only the first 100 results on each year were taken into consideration. The documentation was extended to include video materials found on the website www.youtube.com, which were then collected in a playlist that is available for viewing on the youtube channel of tranzit. ro/ Iaşi:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1z-2WPLEO79dwlbiDsr4zA/playlists

The exhibition design is a reference to television studios or movie sets, where filming is done using Chroma key, a technique that serves to cut out and replace the background in photographs and video footage.

Între noi / Between us is a project by artist Constantin Răileanu, structured in the shape of a book. As we leaf through it we are immersed on the one hand in the tale of the Goat with three kids by Ion Creangă, and on the other hand in the economic plot woven by approximately one hundred receipts certifying the transfer of money from parents working abroad to their children living in Romania. Through its reference to Creangă's well-known text (in Romania, the tale is one of the first texts read to and by children) and through its juxtaposition to the image of the receipts and implicitly to the financial, pragmatic aspect of our family relationships, the book Între noi / Between us appeals to our collective memory and brings into the spotlight new aspects of the parent-children relationships that have emerged recently in the Romanian society.

Online Generation reopens an extremely delicate topic for the Romanian public space, without, however, aiming to solve the issues it poses. The works approach the affective side of these issues, trying to highlight our collective being's opportunity of growing up emotionally, in keeping with the economic, social and political changes of the past 25 years.

Online Generation is a project realized with the financial support of the Iași City Hall through the 2015 programme for non-reimbursable funding granted by the Iași City Hall budget.

ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit. ro.