The Dead Are Silent /Mortii sunt tacuti
The Dead Are Silent, installation,
Salonul de proiecte, Bucuresti, 2016		 Revolutionize, Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kiev, 2018
The rain of candles hanging from the ceiling, in the hallway – at the entrance to the exhibition –, but also in one of the corners of the exhibition space (traditionally reserved for orthodox icons, and previously desecrated by Malevich and his Black Square in 1915) is a piece entitled The Dead Are Silent. It is accompanied by a quotation from Theodor Lessing, which could also be interpreted as a key for the entire exhibition, unless the visitor would rather escape such reading keys, searching for the meaning (and finding it!) in the structure of each piece of the Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor's show. Roughly summing up Lessing's words, this is what this controversial victim of the recent history states: the human being is the one transforming causality into norm, setting aside any break in this order, miracle, chaos, coincidence, as abnormal. The candles hanging with the wick down refer to a field of meaning which belongs to magic and pagan practices, a space of "reversed candles".
Daria Ghiu

The work is accompanied by a fragment from Theodor Lessing's text, History as Giving Meaning to the meaningless, 1919:
"It is only the amazing fabrication of mankind to proceed as though causality is the norm, and breakdowns in causal connections (for example miracles, chaos, crime, coincidence) are actually abnormal, whereas it is the other way around. Causality is Ariadne's thread by means of which we feel our way through the labyrinth of irrational life.
(...)
The dead are silent. And for the last remaining one, everything that was before him has always made sense insofar as it relates and must relate to his form of existence, which is to say, he and his sense system can only understand from the entire prehistory of the same type. Victors always write the history of the conquered, those who have survived, the stories of the dead."
 

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