RO_ARCHIVE puts together a proposal centered on the model of the Postmodern and Post-structuralist archive. The modernist collection of cultural objects preserved as testimony of an identitary past becomes nowadays form of artistic expression, over-encompassing factor, or filter of cultural redundancy. No longer limited by its condition as treasurer of the past, the archive is free to be a part of the mapping of the present and the facilitation of the new.
In the era of tautological information and technically archived culture, marked by ready-made, RO_ARCHIVE sets to approach the archive in Boris Groys fashion, as a machine that produces the future, a last criterion that can delimitate art from non-art. Any artistic innovation, re-evaluation, or novelty determined to penetrate the field of contemporary art can thus be certified by its acceptance in the archive
project commissioned RO_ARCHIVE
Urban architecture no longer preserves the element so common in older and rural (still) architecture: the guest room. If other spaces in the house may be arranged to serve needs of comfort and utility, the guest room speaks best of the owner’s options and ideas of beauty, of local customs and present times. The Chambred’amis series was shot in houses from South Romania, in villages along the Danube, which were extremely traditional until recently. Locally, the guestroom is literally called “the good room”, suggesting its importance to the family.
The images in the series illustrate the chaotic mix of traditional and modern furniture, decorations, home appliances. In some of the rooms, the only hint of the rural location is the proud owner wearing the typical dress in a countryside household. In Chambred’amis modernization and urbanization can mean an absence of d’amis, as we can see some of the guest rooms turning into storage spaces.
10/1 is comprised of ten photographs, taken in ten single room flats in an apartment block located in the eastern area of Bucharest. It is a 10-storey apartment block, and the apartments are placed one on top of the other. They are identical, both in the detail of the exterior and interior. I have selected this building as I also live in it, on the 10th floor, and it is easier to approach the subjects. It is only one apartment block, erected in 1966, of the approximately 70,000 apartment blocks facing the same problem.
I took a photograph of each apartment (the interior of each space) from the same angle, in order to better illustrate the mix of social classes in the block, displaying only differences in the character and design of the interior. The rooms may be regarded as a psychological chart of those who live in them, reflecting their history and relation to present times.
/3/ chats with /2/ on the messenger. /1/ talks to/2/, on the messenger or one of the two mobiles he has. He asks /2/ to tell /3/ about the football game they're having at this or that time. /3/, a supporter of both Steaua and Dinamo, actually, of „whoever wins the match”, shares the info with /4/, for whom everything that /1/ says is the law. /4/ tells/5/about it. The game begins. /1/’s scooter is leaning against the gate. His coat is hanging on one of the handlebars, with the two phones hidden in the secret pocket. One of them starts ringing. /5/ is admonished for not going to fetch it. /2/ knows what it is all about. /5/ to /1/: “ oh, I think it’s the guy who rang yesterday again”. /3/ and /4/ exchange accomplice glances. Well, /1/ knows well enough how he’s lose all stature he stand in front of /2/ unless he's have /5/ to fetch his mobile, while /3/ and /4/ would completely disregard him.
This is the story behind the portraits taken by Bogdan Gîrbovan, more specifically, the relation between the subjects and the actions entailed by them, tasks assigned to them. The group 5@14 only works out if each character fully undertakes its role. The diathesis of the portraits tells us on the individual as a metonymy of the group, where the whole depends on its elements, just as one element is subjected to the whole. This relation puts forward a hierarchy of ever tensed pinions, in a frail balance, likely to be broken by a mere phone call from one of their mothers. We’re talking, after all, of a fake hierarchy, and of a sort of male Lolitas, on their transformation from young boys to young man. Bogdan Gîrbovan has no intention of being exhaustive, but nevertheless leaves us with the feeling that the entire social mechanism would be disfunctional without the close presence of 5@14. The photography footnotes speak of a social context tattooed on our skin. From this perspective, Bogdan Gîrbovan’s portraits, brought down to physiognomy, illustrate an evolution from the remote bodymap of Erico job, to the urgent contemporary facemap, body art always and stubbornly recurring to the human face. August Sander, a retrospective kin of Bogdan Gîrbovan, once said, at the beginning of the previous century, that if we consider it to be true that not only the face, but also the gestures are characteristic of an individual, then, the task of the photographer will be that or registering gestures in his photography. Bogdan Gîrbovan puts forward a transfer of the gestures on the physiognomy.
5@14 is a meta-photographical essay. When /2/ is asked to tell /3/ the time when the football match is organised at, and /3/ also tells /4/, for whom everything /1/ says is the law, /2/ is not the one in hold of the power, neither is /3/ or /4/, but it is /1/ who is in control of everything. As the photography is concerned, it is not the one in hold of the object called “photography” who holds the power, but the photographer. The holder of the photography only holds a technical image charged with the information that the photographer is conveying. A neoimperialism, as VilémFlusser would put it, nearly of the urban tribe, seen as a group with no ideology. Born between ’95 and ’96, these children somehow stand for the fantasies of a generation free of world wars, revolutions or fall of totalitarian regimes. They might as well represent an effigy of the contemporary man reflected by a social mirror described more than half a century ago, as the best of all possible worlds. Bogdan Gîrbovan’s regard is pointed specifically towards this reflection.
text by Igor Mocanu
2 Star Trip is a RoArchive order – an initiative to document post-communist Romania.
My personal option was to shot a series of images along the Black Sea Coast. Photographs in 2 Star Trip swing between peaceful hideouts and architectural mayhem
project commissioned RO_ARCHIVE
There's a scene in one of Ferdinand Zecca's short comedies, The Policemen’s Little Run (1907), in which a dog with a hunk of meat in his mouth runs around the city chased by some police officers. In the hubbub raised, the dog does not hesitate to go through the window of a bedroom, jump over a bed with someone sleeping in it, to go on running for his life. First, the one sleeping in the bed, in pyjamas and nightcap, is befuddled but is only alarmed when an entire squadron on police officers comes in through the window. The sleeping beauty will not be troubled for long, he'll immediately calm down when he sees the police brigade. The police hats, the gimps, the epaulets, have a a quieting effect on the new protagonist, with a soporific outcome.
Since the times when Zecca's film was shot and up to day, where characters in the series of photographs taken by Bogdan Gîrbovan act hierarchically, the strategic uniform was subject to various social, political and economic contextualisations and materializations. From the two world wars, to the last flares of the Cold War, and for Romania, from the fear of the uniform during the (communist) “Golden Age” and to the exhilarating alternative of the Gucci & Adibas (sic!) uniform, the most effective remained nonetheless the uniforms which walk into your bedroom, that is to say the uniforms which walk into your private space in full authority, of yet unsuspected metamorphoses in the conscience of the tax payer.
For the first time since August Sander, Romanian Police Hierarchy investigates accurately initiation of the dialogue between the uniform and the citizen, between the prerogatives of power and those of chaos – because from the uniform's perspective, the citizen is a seed of social entropy, whereas from the citizen's perspective, the uniform is a reminder that the state is present. None of the two perspectives is absolute, but this dialogue, whether we like it or not, is still needed. Let as at least lead this dialogue knowingly.
Igor Mocanu