Romania's Ways of Opening to the World: A Conversation with Bogdan Iacob
Saturday, 18 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS CoordInates
The former socialist states of the Eastern Bloc have the distinct and rare epistemic advantage of going in recent history through the living experience of two very different paradigms that have determined to a significant extent both the internal social order and the external political positioning and presence. However, the width of this epistemic difference has been all but erased in the exclusively Western orientation of East European working bodies and minds after the “opening” of the Iron Curtain, which ironically has reduced the local sense of the world. But how did the travelers, the workers and the professional classes – doctors, architects, artists – traverse this difference, then and now? What lessons could be learned and what remains valid and useful for reopening our sense of the world today, towards a world of solidarity and plurality, hope and reinvention?
Coordinated by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, the conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
Short bio
Bogdan C. Iacob is a researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History (Romanian Academy) and at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies (Austrian Academy of Sciences). His work focuses on experts (historians and physicians) from Southeastern and Central Europe at international organizations and in (post)colonial spaces during the twentieth century.
The event is part of the program Cultivators of Life, a multianual project organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association and co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. Curated by Adelina Luft, the program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences, realized through a series of artistic residencies, open events in gardens around Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous thinkers and a final group in 2026 at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen.
The program does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the program's content or any use to which the program outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
