| In
their two-part video work The Palace (2003-2004) Florin Tudor and Mona Vatamanu
focus on the icon of power in Romania per se: Nicolae Ceausescu's former
palace, which now houses both the Romanian parliament and the National Museum
of Contemporary Art (MNAC), which was opened in 2004. Like no other building,
the "House of the People" crystallizes Romania's recent history
and its ambivalent way of dealing with it. Tudor and Vatamanu shot footage
of two official guided tours for visitors to the building without giving
prior notice of their intention to film. The "official", institutional
voice of the building is typical not only of how the site's history - and
thus also the country's recent past - is depicted in a different light on
each of the tours, but also of how the rhetoric of superlatives is constantly
shot through with flashes of irony and personal insecurity. By contrast,
the video piece Vacaresti (2006) "commemorates" the old regime
with a monument of failure, but one which remains visible only for the duration
of the artist's performance. In a desolate landscape in winter weather a
young man - Florin Tudor - paces out the outline of the old Vacaresti Monastery,
demolished to make way for the "Palace". As he laboriously progresses,
his feet repeatedly sink into the soft terrain. It is a search held on the
uncertain ground of the recent past on which Romania's present is built.
The Synchronicity of
the Asynchronic, Astrid Wege presented this topic on 18 october 2006 at
the Kunstmuseum Bonn, as part of the Elektronenstrome series
We grew up here while our cities, Bucharest and Constanta, were being demolished to make way for the totalitarian dystopia of the 1980s. Afterwards, many Romanians began living in blocks of flats.
The palace was left unfinished by its owner, Nicolae Ceausescu, former president of the R.S.R., who was killed in 1989. The building now houses the Parliament. The guided tour tells both Ceausescu’s story and the story of the building, including its social implications for the lives of people in Bucharest.
We are unsure how to categorize our act of filming there. Diana, the guide, performed almost like a character, reminiscent of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, while simultaneously narrating the profound drama of the palace’s presence. The horror this building evokes for us is difficult to describe — perhaps ridiculous, incoherent, absurd, or aggressive.
The boundary between filming legally or illegally is thin: the edifice now hosts the Parliament, yet you are allowed to film for a fee of nine euros. Another striking aspect is that if you live in Bucharest, it is nearly impossible to grasp the scale of material wasted until you visit the palace as a foreign tourist. In a city of socialist blocks of flats, you encounter a palace — a deviation from the ideal of “palaces for the people.”
We kept the footage like character of the film, encouraging viewers to experience the palace as a tourist would. After the first film, we made a second one with a different guide. Unsurprisingly, his discourse and story differed, revealing the contradictions of Romanian society. The two films function as an installation, creating a space for engaging with a post-traumatic social reality.
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