vector 2_1.cdr - Universitatea de Arte "George Enescu"

Bik van der Pol - Teach me
Something, detail from the
installation in the Palace of
Culture, Iaşi
and chef, the one who repairs umbrellas in the Nicolina Market worked as an
engineer, etc.); they acquired their new abilities pressed by the need to survive. Exbeneficiaries
of a collective and bankrupt economy, they felt the urge of
professional reorientation
Beyond these considerations, their approach suggests the importance of
this “knowledge”, which may seem, at first sight, inessential and insignificant. The
value of this informal knowledge is given by the strict anchorage in the sociocultural
reality of the last sixteen years. This type of knowledge, holding nothing in
common with the official mediums of disseminating values and information, will
probably slowly disappear, engulfed by the new capitalist economical orientation.
The only thing that remains is the main idea of this project – this kind of knowledge
is just another type of pedagogy, a different approach, informal and more relaxed,
of a “science” of producing manually fabricated consumer goods, in which the
human involvement is more direct and specific.
Teach me Something illuminates some aspects of the local development
which, usually, are situated in a territory of anonymity and indistinctness.
Translated by Alexandru Bounegru
building contexts_networking contexts
A few notes about the making of
“Everything / Synchronisation”?
Laura HORELLI
Laura Horelli is a Finish artist
living in Berlin. She
participated in the Periferic 7
Biennial in the section Social
Processes, curated by Marius
Babias and Angelika Nollert.
I was in Iaşi twice this spring; in January for a week and in April for
another three weeks. The environment was new to me and I wanted to learn and
understand, to make some sort of a map of the context I was working in. I
gathered bits of information about Iaşi and Romania from the Internet and
libraries in Berlin as well as on location from different institutions, through
informal discussions and organized interviews. I was researching couple of
interests in parallel. Firstly I was interested in the “60s generation” Romanian
authors Ana Blandiana and Marin Sorescu and “80s generation” writer Liviu
Antonesei and how they dealt with censorship at the time of the dictatorship and
how after the revolution all of them, even if briefly, were politicians. Secondly I
was asking some members of the Vector association to describe and comment
on photographs I had taken of various locations in the city. Thirdly I was
interested in the Jewish history of Iaşi and how this history was visible in the city
today.
Obviously much of the research would have been impossible without
Vector Association. I had questions, I needed to contact people, I had to have
translation and filming help. To begin with I did not have a ready idea to impose
on the context, so the project was shaped by the discussions I had in Iaşi.
Cătălin Gheorghe especially took much time to explain about things. What
surprised me at first was how present the memories of the Ceauşescu
dictatorship were among people of my age; the regime was brutal in the 1980s.
Since I live in East Berlin I thought of the often slightly nostalgic stories I have
heard from people who grew up in East Germany in the 1980's and about the
stories I was hearing now. Not that there were only bad memories - Matei
Bejenaru said once that at least there used to be time; for walks, for a picnic.
Now one is always in a rush. I did wonder how Vector members could manage to
teach in the art school, organize the Biennale and work on their own stuff (I
suppose it was less of own work as the opening of Periferic 7 drew near).
Getting information proved sometimes to be a process. For example, at
first we did not find much information about the newly established Centre for
Jewish Studies at the "Al. I. Cuza" University. Then we met Adrian Cioflâncă
from the Institute of History “A.D Xenopol”, who teaches at the MA programme.
He provided us with much information and publications. The Jewish community
was easy to approach, even though it was painful for some of its elderly
members to think back at the Iaşi pogrom of 1941. The head of the Jewish
community, Picu Kaiserman, pointed out monuments like the one of Abraham
Goldfaden in the park of the National Theatre, as places he likes in Iaşi. The first
Jewish theatre in the world used to exist in that location. Institutions like
Literature House Pogor provided us with varied kinds of information, but were
helpful in establishing contact with the writer Ana Blandiana, whom I met in
Bucharest. Another writer I was interested in, Marin Sorescu, died in 1996. We
wrote to the Marin Sorescu Foundation several times with no success before
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