Trop tôt, trop tard* | Too early, too late. Activating the present, now.
paralell event to BB4, Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art, May 21-July 25 2010.
opening 12:00 on saturday May 29 in Rahova-Uranus, around CIAC and laBomba pojects, Calea Rahovei nr. 194 and street crossing Strada Sabinelor and at PAVILION UNICREDIT, Sos. Nicolae Titulescu nr. 1 (Piata Victoriei) at 19:00. (lecture by Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng and a sound piece by d’incise)
From 20th of May to 30th of May, 12 students from HEAD Geneva - installation department and work.master, contemporary art practices, Haute école d’art et de design, HEAD Genève, Switzerland - join Bucharest and work on site specific interventions around the housing area of Rahova-Uranus. The idea is to produce singular views on what the term of „Handlung“, as Felix Vogel makes it accessible for his concept on the public sphere in Bucharest, can mean in terms of an ephemeral art production.
Trop tôt, trop tard | Too early, too late. Activating the present, now. is also asking about the conflict of being elsewhere than in the right place at the right time, of missed opportunities, and a possible change.
The projects include installation, performance, actions, writing, sound- and video art.
Natalia Comandari, d’incise, Stephan Freivogel, Stéphanie Giorgis, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Sonia Kacem, Olga Kokcharova, Florent Meng, Violetta Perra, Vincent de Roguin, Roxana Sima, Emeline Vitte
Natalia Comandari and Violetta Perra are working together on a mobile structure, a kiosk-like sculpture. This little hut „Macondo“ is moving to different spaces around the housing area of Rahova-Uranus. „Macondo“ is a kind of surprise box, offering different possibilities of use for local people, the neighborhood and the participants involved in this project. A reflection about the condition of art in public space as well as the different uses of public spaces in Romania, which seem to lack of conviviality, is aimed to be tested for some days on a one to one scale.
The project aims to play with the foreignness, like when in the past foreign people, travellers and migrants used to arrive to cities bringing in new stories, ideas, inventions and ways of living. „Macondo“ is the name of a fictional isolated village in the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in „100 Years of Solitude“, where strangers use to reconstruct a heterotopic culture, a mix of cultural identities.
The project aims to play with the foreignness, like when in the past foreign people, travellers and migrants used to arrive to cities bringing in new stories, ideas, inventions and ways of living. „Macondo“ is the name of a fictional isolated village in the novel of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in „100 Years of Solitude“, where strangers use to reconstruct a heterotopic culture, a mix of cultural identities.
The focus of Violetta Perra’s performances is on the creation of traces by making an unfamiliar city tour, by embodying the Rahova-Uranus area in order to discover the urban and social architecture of the city. By a series of performing actions, her aim is to create concrete but also metaphorical traces, which will leave behind permanent or temporary evidences, time-based events. The meeting point and departure of any performance action will be the ‘Macondo’ kiosk.
Roxana Sima proposes a reading in the coffee grounds. She does her coffee grounds reading session in the ‘Macondo’ kiosk for one day, installing a small stove on which she will boil coffee in a special pot called ‘ibric’. People from Rahova-Uranus are invited to join trying to have a subjective reading on the traces left in the cups. Roxana Sima uses a manual that has been published, in order to read the coffee grounds. Knowledge on how to interpret the signs will be exchanged and shared with the community. In Romania this practice has a longtime background, for many centuries it was inscribed in a spiritual culture. The signs themselves are related to the future, the present or even a longer prospective in time.
Searching for a poetical form of urban geology, Sonia Kacem intervenes in Rahova-Uranus’ public space, working on an often appearing form in public space: the pile, the accumulation of garbage, rubbish, building material, of sand and stones or just flotsam and jetsam. A collection of material coming from different sites around Rahova-Uranus will be composing this installation. The piled up mass is a cluster of different inordinate colors and materials that interacts in the urban context with just a slight shift to the already existing piles.
The focus of Stephanie Giorgis’ installation is the changing urban landscape. Since the city of Bucharet passed through different conditions in terms of history, social and political changes, the heterogeneous layers of architecture witness theses changes up to nowadays. Her installation is connected to the communitary space in Rahova-Uranus, where she built a sandbox for children as well as for adults. The constant changing and reshaping of the city can be translated into this maquette situation. Architecture-based molds can be used to cast an individual city model connected to the past, the future, the possible and the impossible.
Emeline Vitte is also concerned with the eclecticism of Bucharest’s architecture, which shows the change of the city. Her aim is to underline this specific urban configuration in adding extensions to some particular buildings. Theses extensions suggest potential architectures, playing with the different perspectives the spectator can have in front of theses constructions.
In comparison to other cities, Bucharest is characterized by its vagueness from an urbanistic point of view. To try to understand this particular situation, one could try to establish multiple links with it’s past, as well as speculating about the unfolding future. Although, in either case, one would find himself offset with an ungraspable present. In a utopian impulse to capture this evanescent instantaneity, Olga Kokcharova is walking through the city, reciting a text about its potential past and future, using fragments of historical references and quotations. It is of no matter to come to this place too early or too late. Her very inscription in its urban soundscape is what activates the present for the fleeting time of this action. The recording and the diffusion of this sound piece is more than documentation, but rather a subjective appropriation.
The sound and visual artist d’incise is working in close relationship with LaBomba's actions in the neighborhood, generating artistic material and making it available as commons goods, open for future transformations and evolutions.
Looking for a use of sound as a social positioning and an affirmation of the resistances and claims for the community’s space existence.
According to Michel de Certeau the act of walking is connected to the urban system in terms of enunciation: „The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.“
Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng decide to stride along the streets of the city of Bucharest during 5 days, inviting every day a new person to join them in a walk/talk. This walks, that last 6 hours each and cover about 20 kilometers, are documented in various ways. The walk/talk project aims at producing new forms when the conventional tools turn out to be inadequate to capture everydayness.
With his sound works fusing musique concrète strategies with corroded archive material, wobbling between documentary testimonies and tactile textures, Vincent de Roguin involves the audience in a space where memories and physical reality are staged according to an uncanny play between scale, form and function. Through the leveling of sound material and narrative clues, his compositions investigate the constitution of reality in a poetic pursuit of the tipping point where the mundane and the fantastic collide. An interview recorded on location at Rahova-Uranus gets mixed with atmospheric sounds from the area but the status of each layer is re-examined in the manner of a Hörspiel under a damaged stethoscope.
The project is accompanied by Katharina Hohmann and Laurent Schmid, both professors HEAD Genève in collaboration with Felix Vogel.
*The title is a quotation from a sentence by Dan Perjovschi, on our first visit in his studio in Bucharest, during spring 2008, as well as referring to a film by Jean-Marie Straub / Danièle Huillet, 1981.
