Diffracting Bucharest
by Maria Persu & Aurel Minulescu
Diffracting Bucharest (2023) draws on Maria Persu’s master’s dissertation in sociology, “Gardens of Eden? Worlding ‘Creativity’ in (Post)Postsocialist Bucharest”. As a collaborative project between Aurel Minulescu and Maria Persu, the video continues the research process in a differential manner. As the footage, shot by Aurel Minulescu, brings to life entanglements of the city (21 tram) that were not initially considered, such as the casino culture of the precariat, the de-gendered voice of Amelia, a British-sounding AI, narrates a poetic rendition of the original paper.
Display recommendation: For an immersive experience of the video, we recommend the viewer to use headphones.
VIDEO TEXT:
seconds plagued by death
selves obliterated by light
i am a manipulative piece of shit
sometimes
sometimes when
when cars dust sun shopping bags
movements of people
and of
of our nothingness.
there is a strange feeling that comes with knowing
every corner
sensing collapsed concretes
as they come to life
places of rebirth
not nature, everything
you feel is you & is not you –
i rage amongst sidewalks and pigeons
i search for that death plague.
I start noticing during the pandemic.
I write snippets of text about the city.
In the lockdown context of troubling silence,
I find myself walking around an empty Bucharest.
I take photographs.
I, unknowingly, build a research archive as, for the first time, I feel a strong emotional connection towards the city.
In the midst of personal, local, and global catastrophes,
I experience an increased sense of attention towards mundane encounters with the streets, cats, pigeons, trashed foods, weeds, decaying and newly built homes and institutions.
The (un)disturbed landscapes in my proximity.
I try to stay with the affections that Bucharest engenders.
Turning to my personal archives, temporalities cumulate.
We find new ways to refurbish our bodies as Western.
Circuits of power, forever rearranging.
Individual streets act as sociomaterial dispositifs.
They archive the multiple modernization projects that have reconfigured the city.
As well as their destruction.
We find ourselves living in the rubbled landscapes of past capitalisms and socialisms.
In the aftermath of the cruel promise that postsocialist Westernification would finally materialize the fantasy of a good life for Eastern Europeans.
Yet.
In this atmosphere of life after the end of histories,
visionaries of progress continue to carefully bind their hopeful stories about a utopian urban future.
They assemble in parks and gardens.
As rubble turns into ruin.
As the social form of the working class dissolutes.
The typography worker is replaced by the web designer, the ad person, the young start-up entrepreneur.
No longer does the power of factory exploitation feed capitalism. It is, presumably, self-managing.
Reflexivity may be welcome or, at least, kept close-by. As a source of inspiration.
There is a tendency to get caught into the many pasts that the city breeds.
But noticing this tendency is to see how certain affections are coming to pass.
According to Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, to research your hometown is to place yourself in a “past-present-future”.
Straying away “far from official data, overwhelmed with a lifetime of the real”.
Re-making the field as you write.
Research questions, a list:
What politics of space and time are mobilized in Bucharest’s transformations?
How is ‘creativity’ reconfigured and how does it reconfigure the city in these spatiotemporal worldings?
How are ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ conceptualized and practiced in relation to Bucharest’s urban gardens?
How is ‘creativity’ reconfigured and how does it reconfigure the city in these spatiotemporal worldings?
How are the ruins of the inter-war period remade?
Has postsocialism as a lived reality dissolved already?
What radical possibilities can be unlocked by paying attention to socially-engaged art practices?
space-time-matterings
smooth // striated spacetime
socialism
postsocialism
postpostsocialism
virtualities of the past
knowledge // the unknowability of the city
The list could be longer, overwhelmingly long.
Like a double-bladed sword, memory is there to help and to halt the process.
New entanglements, actualizing pasts together with desired futures,
The city still won’t allow itself to become sterile.
When the dreams of modernizers are halted, when, as Romanian sociologist Liviu Chelcea writes, “previous efforts to separate nature from society cease”, unlikely actors step in.
They make it hard to build white cubes, to erase social inequality, and ruin.
Creativity may be seen as the process by which the orderings of power-knowledge are stabilized.
Through creativity, entanglements of the city come to matter differently, forms of exclusion are materialized and perpetuated.
<< Capital C Cultures >> differentiate themselves from everyday jolts of creativity.
Yet their reliance on the quotidian is inevitable.
On imagination.
On sociomaterial conditions that are already at play, or coming to play.
And at the same time, in their making, << Capital C Cultures >> get bogged down by the material and discursive forces of the everyday.
By its histories of fallen modernities. Through holes in the ceiling.
By entities that just won’t let things stand straight.
Through radical art practices.
By various acts of protests that, although marginal, come to nurture a queer temporality of postsocialism, one that won’t simply follow the chronology of Western politics.