Istoria (nu) se repetă / History Does (Not) Repeat Itself
Screening and public discussion
by Veda Popovici and Mircea Nicolae
Saturday, 15 September 2018, time TBA
tranzit.ro/ Iași
Str. Al. Lăpușneanu, nr. 7-9
On Saturday, 15th of September, we invite you to the screening of History Does (Not) Repeat Itself, followed by a public discussion with the authors of the film, Veda Popovici and Mircea Nicolae.
The transition from dark to light, from authoritarianism to freedom, from communism to capitalism - they form the great narrative of the recent period. It casts collective experiences of solidarity and resistance in the footnotes of history.
Visits and projections of the 1990s and 2000s, post-revolutionary wishes for a truly better world for all and all, they remain buried under charities, miners and departures abroad.
In History Does (Not) Repeat Itself, they return fragmented and imperfect in the narratives of the possible but lost worlds: feminist trade unions, radical movements, collaborative economic projects, information campaigns on the dangers of the new capitalism.
A collaboration between Veda Popovici and Mircea Nicolae, History Does (Not) Repeat Itself, is the exploration of key historical moments from 1989-2000.
In 2017, one of the products of this research was a 40-minuts film called "Post-Revolutionary Stories". It encompasses the general directions and the basic intentions of the whole initiative.
Using the documentary fiction method, the film repeats and fixes a whole series of historical situations that have generated dysfunctions and problems at the time, leaving behind a great social pressure that is still felt today. On these moments it is intervene with alternative temporal and spatial narratives anchored in the city of Bucharest, elaborated during workshops on themes of transition, through collaboration with a number of artists, opinion makers, social activists and sociologists.
Participants in History Does (Not) Repeat Itself, 2017:
Claudiu Cobilanschi, Dora Constantinovici, Carmen Gheorghe, Roxana Marin, Tudorina Mihai, Adrian Paun, Ioana Vlad, Victor Vozian.
Veda Popovici (1986, Timisoara) works as a political, theoretical and local activist theorist. Her interests cross these fields, including interventions in the policies of representing collective identities, feminist and decolonial practices, and political / political offensive to art. Her political engagements lie in local struggles for housing justice and community organization of life and work, within the Macaz cooperative, the Common Front for the Right to Housing and the Political Art Gazette. She completed her doctoral thesis on nationalism in the art of Romania in the 70s and 80s and held a course on decolonial thinking about art and culture in Romanian context, both at the National Art University in Bucharest. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Between the years 2006 - 2009, Mircea Nicolae developed a series of a hundred artistic interventions during which he researched the socio-political structure of the city of Bucharest through the medium of anonymous interventions in public spaces and deserted places, while at the same time investigating the more intimate space of personal emotional history. These artistic interventions reflected on, among other topics, the social consequences of consumerism, of urban legislation, but also the production of architecture from the capital city. In his more recent works, Mircea Nicolae is interested in the urban identity of a city in permanent cultural and economic transformation. Nicolae analyzes these material and semantic changes with the help of video works. At the same time, he places into discussion these problems using the methodology of documentary photography, produced with the use of a large format camera.
