Souvenir from Nowhere

01-18.12.2017
Opening: Thursday, 07.12.2017, h. 15.00
Live performances: Saturday, 09.12.2017, h. 15.00
FAAP Sao Paolo

Artists:
Alina Popa, Florin Flueraș, Irina Gheorghe, Mona Vătămanu&Florin Tudor, Larisa Crunțeanu, Xandra Popescu

The children’s story “În căutarea norocului” [Searching for One’s Fortune] (Moș Nae [N. Batzaria], Ed. Universul, Bucharest, 1943), tells the story of a Romanian peasant, Moș Barbu, who chose to emigrate to Brazil as a last resort solution to escape the oppressive feudalist relations still at work in the local agricultural labour system. Usually, stories such as this one, based on the idealization of remote areas, end up either in disaster or in a phantasm in which characters are chasing their own tails in tragic psychological rondos. For the latter, reality serves only as a medium for their further deception: the dystopian chimera of the castle in Kafka’s writings, the whale, romantically pursued in Melville’s classic Moby Dick, or the imaginary City of Z in the real story of Colonel Fawcett’s famous and disastrous Amazonian expedition. All of these are, in the last instance, imaginary territories built as alienation protocols of thought.

The jungle is conceived as a place where the crop needs a much shorter cycle and land needs much less work, and where the peasant finally gains a right to laziness in a post-work economy avant-la-lettre. Despite being based on an idealization of the tropical landscape, the story is socially and politically groundbreakingly realist. The emigrant Romanian peasant pays for his boat trip from Hamburg to Bahia with his employment of himself and his family as slaves on a sugarcane plantation in Brazil. The self-alienated peasant becomes an advocate of the forcefully alienated African population shipped to Brazil to work on plantations for the wellbeing of Western prosperity and commerce. He even mentions to the Portuguese plantation chief the story of the abolition of the 19th century Roma slavery in Southern Romania, urging him to follow this example.

The story also avoids ending up as a cautionary tale against the abandonment of the national land – school books and pastoral literature idealizations of it as mother-ground. Against all literary odds, “În căutarea norocului” can be read as a manifesto for self-determination through alienation from the origin territory. Moș Barbu bonds friendship with African slaves, helps them flee, finally settling with his family in Minas Gerais. Bringing to mind Freyre’s idea of miscegenation, his son builds a mixed racial family. The peasants never return to Romania, never leave this territory, where the accelerated rhythm of the crop ensures good life under the sun of the Southern hemisphere.

This surprisingly happy-end story of Romanian agriculture in the jungle is a surprising account of the relationship between geographical areas at the periphery of enlightenment, positivizing the subversive potential of alienation. In the history of visual arts, the exhibition space started as a limbo-place to accommodate curiosities brought from the New World to Europe. The prefix “ex” of the word “exhibition” suggests the idea of separation, a specifically modernist gesture, revealing the white cube’s status of alienation space. A receptacle of Western civilization’s imaginary projection of the other, the white cube becomes a space of product presentation, where any mark of distinction sells well on the market. “Souvenir from Nowhere” retains the alienation potential of the exhibition’s immaculate backdrop and wipes out its products. “Souvenir from Nowhere” is an attempt to emphasize aesthetic and literary technologies of alienation for the creation of new social and physical spaces, unaccounted for by modernity’s sensibility. (text by Alina Popa)

Produced with the kind support of: the Romanian Cultural Institute and Residência Artística Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado.
Work descriptions here.