"Persepolis explores post-socialist dwelling, starting from the realization that "Bucharest contains superimposed patterns of constructed utopia". If I may be forgiven the pedantic nuisance of a Greek etymology, persepolis was one of Athena's attributes, meaning "she who destroys cities". More or less overtly, the memory of ravage is always there in the photographs, as are the residues of ideology and unrestrained political power. Read diachronically, the images show the painful co-existence of three historical strata: early modernism, the particular brand of modernism practiced during communist times, and the contorted ways of new, post-revolutionary architecture. The flotsam of early modernism is what the severe interventions of communist urbanism left behind, as they sought to remap Bucharest by displacement and disruption, producing grids and gridlocks and paralyzing the organic growth of the city. Persepolis includes both the ceremonial and the social type of communist architecture, the first designed to express absolute power and a complete disregard to notions of utility and scale, and the second to replicate endlessly the same precarious suburb, lending itself reluctantly to dwelling and discouraging the establishment of communities. In its turn, the socialist layer sustains today the onslaught of entrepreneurial urban thinking, engulfing and building upon urban dysfunction, adaptable and indifferent to context, channeling peripheral energies of opposition and colonizing space indiscriminately. Old and new ruins are striving to mute each other in cacophonic agglomeration: read synchronically, the images introduce viewers to an architectural war front, a site of collisions or tense juxtapositions between disjointed urban fragments, taking bricolage to the level of state policy and defying the prospect of a restorative master plan.
I would not argue that Persepolis aims to chart this "city in progress", the Bucharest of emergency and uncertain deadlines, although an interstitial counter-geography, an emergent city mixed in and against the existing one is sometimes noticeable. Instead of cartography, the project makes reference to another visualization device: the panorama. This panorama of Bucharest is "history made visible", in tandem with the definition proposed by Roland Barthes - yet not in the sense of a linear, impersonal flow of distant history, but "in the flesh" of buildings and places, by reading architecture like a narrative fresco."
Text by Mihnea Mircan

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