Alba Neagra
film, 2', Berlin, 2006
photo installation, Berlin, 2006

installation, "How to Do Things? - In the Middle of (No)where", Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, Berlin

In the beginning of May, we found groups of Serbian people on Liebknecht Bridge playing alba neagra, or the shell game, a street con played by a group of four to five men - the dealer and three to four players, who try to involve passers-by. Here the groups were composed of both women and men playing amongst themselves, a real theatrical performance, because tourists showed no interest in the game. In the background, the Palast der Republik was under demolition. Large banners reading "a democratic decision" were installed on the fences surrounding the construction site. The whole scene suggested that someone in the background was playing alba neagra with history. Attempting to think the shape of a city could be a tricky game. Avoiding temporary empty spaces in urban substance turns out to be impossible, and this has a positive effect on the way those non-places reflect history. From a subjective perspective, Berlin reminds us of our city Bucharest in the way that traces of architecture reflecting different political decisions and economic systems occupy space in ways that conflict with the previously constructed context. Absent buildings and tension between past, present, and future architecture have left traces of hope and trauma. Personal history meets hazardous utopia in this hide-and-seek architecture con game. "In their installation Alba Neagra, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor focus on various aspects of urban transformation: the conquest of existent spaces by architectural elements that reflect political decisions is visualised by a structure that suggests the volume of a tilted house, placed aslant in a room. A video compares the treatment of architecture and history with the shell game, during wich the elements appear and disappear acording to an incomprehensibile and deceptive system. The construction and the video are supplemented by photographs of empty spaces and wastelands in Marzahn, where architecture surprisingly reproduces itself at another spot-that is, in apiaries that duplicate the form of the Plattenbauten found here. The artists examine the ideological traces of architecture and the contradiction ontained the various historic layers." excerpt from How to Do Things? - In he Middle of (No)where..., catalogue, Appropriation of a Space of Possibility by Dorothee Bienert and Antje Weitzel index