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23 April – 7 May 2009, Bucharest, Romania
The former Central Military Bakery Factory
Organiser: DALA Foundation
http://www.dala.ro http://historiaxproject.blogspot.com/ Curators, on-site research: Ovidiu Danes and Petruta Vlad On-site research (Oltenia): Luiza Zamora, colaborator Visual artists: Lea Raszovsky, Dan Condurache, Dimitris Palade Photographer: Sorin Onisor Writer: Chris Tanasescu Wall designer: Ergo
Apparently, between the ruins of the wooden churches and the ruins of the Military Factory there are no similarities. Rural patrimony and urban industrial patrimony are two very different forms of culture that express two parallel ways of living. There is no difference however between the deserting of the village churches and the deserting of the Military Factory. This was the central focus of the dialog proposed by HISTORIA X - the re-evaluation of the heritage condition in Romania at the beginning of the 21st century.
Those are only two instances of certain ways to understand history. There are a number of X ways and X methods to recount “History” or, for that matter, an X number of histories. Between archival memory and poetic enthusiasm it is hard to find a place for genuine patrimony approaching thought.
Between fabricating an identity by declaring history a “patrimony object” and the pleasure of contemplating a patrimonialized object, a harder and harder to understand gap is opening. That quibbling between watching and writing as well as between contemplating and recording runs through the whole of western thinking, no matter if it is about philosophy, art history or patrimony theory. The conceptual inconsistency between those two verbs becomes even more apparent and poignant when the subject matter we deal with consists of an object of worship. When we decide to patrimonialize the church, which should be morphologically speaking a plain activity, we actually patrimonialize humanity. When we place a sign post that reads MUSEUM between the sacred and the people we tear apart a transcendent connection. Such action bears a twofold significance. First of all we are presented with a secularizing of the church, which aims at building up a new, purely intellectual relationship to it. The choice made between “to see” and “to write” becomes crucial at this time. The aesthetic attitude typical of all museal work and, consequently, of any patrimonializing activity, leaves no room for verbalizing. Mute contemplation, the simple pleasure of measuring and analyzing proportions, colors, etc. of the object at hand are, in extremity, instances of musealization. The entering of such objects into certain repertoires and inventories become secondary activities, facts that come naturally as a sequel to that will to preserving the object as such for its beauty only. Amassing data turns that object into a mere piece of information. Archives swarm with such records, thickly intricate bibliographies, conferences and think-tanks focused on that subject, where both professional and amateurish researchers meet to carry on that titanic work. The results are more than often catastrophic: once that record has been completed and published the topic is forgotten for a while and the plethoric discourse gets to drown the object itself. What is then there left of that object, of the church we can no longer enter the way we used to, of the object that we now reinvest with a sacred value that comes under a different disguise, intellectual for sure, in a mode at the same time more profound and shallower as well? That dichotomy represents only one of the patrimony’s paradoxes: to preserve in order to get to know better, to know better in order to establish what is and what is not to be preserved. Two activities that merge and thus make it impossible for us to tell which one comes first. But what happens when we do not even do that, for one thing? When the monument churches are so many that we decide to not even cast a look on them, and we no longer patrimonialize anything?
The HISTORIA X exhibition comes along as the result of an inventory. How many of the 19th century wooden churches in southern Transylvania and northern Oltenia recorded as patrimony B are visitable nowadays? How many of them have survived being patrimonialized, since once intellectually “resacralized” they were completely forsaken? “To exhibit”, “to show” or “to disclose” are verbs that define such a challenge. A mute exhibition where the churches have showed up naked in the full splendor of their dereliction. This exhibition thus proves a certain vocation one can read as romantic, a spellbinding opportunity for a historian’s or artist’s mind to contemplate the past’s ruins and indulge in the deception that they who, after a spell of silence, rediscover that site are its only rightful owners. An illusion historians shall entertain for quite a while yet. The life of those monuments is actually the life of the communities that begot them. Behind them there is nothing more or less than an honest approach: the will to survive by building up an identity, an idea that us, naïve historians, have neglected for so long a period of time.
Our question wavers between to see and to remember, between to know how to see and how to remember. How should we approach that patrimony?
Within that theoretical oscillation between to (de)scribe and to see the art object, the concept of patrimony itself is linked to the interpretation one. Seen as an art – in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s outlook – or, later on, a science, according to Jurgen Habermas, interpretation represents for museums a technique and a rational principle. A certain patrimony is the result of an interpretation through which we render history, and an exhibition an interpretative discourse addressed to our viewers. The twofold vocation – half scientific and half artistic – secures a privileged place among other history methods, for in spite of all debates, history remains an abstract concept around which the objectivity boundary becomes more and more fragile. A short example in that respect is the concept of "abandonment". Certain peoples typically patrimonialize excessively by recording things into archives and by displaying in museums the most meager traces of the past, from a notary public document stating the foundation of the cathedral that towers that city to the worn out shoe of an early medieval royal figure and from a pre-Christian relic to the recent bus ticket with the Olympic Games sign printed on it. To other peoples such approaches would seem ridiculous, especially those peoples that use a liturgical object only for one procession and than throw it away, as well as those who preserve only accidentally the architectural vestiges that are more than two or three centuries old. Those are cultural differences that cover huge geographical areas. In Europe, for instance, the penchant for patrimonializing is almost a definition of the typical way of life and at the same time, maybe the main feature of that culture.
We will probably never know what they initially looked like, how and who built them? But we do know that they are the result of communal work put up by wood-cutters, carpenters, and anonymous peasant painters and we do know that they are the illustration of a certain local spirituality and an identity trademark. We know that those peasant painters also passed away anonymously and that what they left behind was to some people regrets and nostalgia, and to others just cold indifference. How do we put up with the loss, who are we going to turn into when they are completely gone? Despite its stated neutrality, HISTORIA X is not an innocent exhibition. The site and its appearance put together a discourse that dismisses any possible subtle interpretation, by making two different conditions of patrimonialization in early 21st century confront each other: urban industrial patrimony versus rural patrimony. As a contradictory and contrasting choice it cannot but open an avenue for new debates and interpretations we are all invited to involve in. The former Central Military Bakery Factory founded in 1877 has meanwhile fallen into ruin. The pictures of those derelict churches hosted by the abandoned bakery factory halls stand for a forced interpretation of patrimony. Their conjunction is an act of visual violence.
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