Capitalul / Das Kapital
Kapital, film, 59'18", 2007				Le Capital, film, 48'24", 2011
In the film we performed the lecture of the book Das Kapital by Karl Marx making reference to the political economy lessons in school during communist years in Romania. Everyone avoided those classes and topics while being in that system. Later after communism was replaced by neo-liberalism in our country we begun seeing differently the book that nearly changed our world. Now while reading it back as an item of knowledge we think of an idea of complicity between the reader in the film and the person watching it later on. This idea of "reading together" was determinative for us to work on the project.
Le Capital, installation view, Argos Centre for Arts and Media, Brussels, 2014

"When I first saw Vatamanu and Tudor's films, I was actually in the midst of re-reading Capital. I was working my way through the chapter on original or "primitive" accumulation, which is one of the most internationalist chapters in the book because it describes, among other things, the excesses of the colonial system. "Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt," Marx says, and the "rosy dawn of capital" was preceded by an epoch of expropriation, bloody legislation, enclosure, and colonial genocide - all in the name of lofty ideals. The state played a key role in institutionalizing this violence. The methods of original accumulation, writes Marx, "all emply the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition." This is ultimately what wrests briefly independent producers from their means of production and creates a new class of "free" laborers. Marx uses the word vogelfrei, literally "free as a bird", to describe producers who at firstown their means of production but then become "open game" for exploitation. Here freedom becomes the freedom to work, under relations of production that extend a legalized, less abrasive version of that original violence. "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power," Marx concludes..." excerpt from The Wrong Version of Capital? by David Riff, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.
Capitalul, film, 60', 2007
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