BETWEEN HOME AND ELSWHERE
Essay by Mona Filip for C Magazine, Issue 99, Art Diasporas
As a young teenager in Bucharest in the 80s, I would fall asleep every night to Voice of America or Free Europe playing on my grandmother's radio, louder and louder as she grew increasingly deaf. Certain things that had to do with the politics of the "Golden Epoch" (Ceausescu's Communist Romania) had not been explained to me at that age, so I did not know exactly what those broadcasts were about. I only knew that they mysteriously entered our home from far away, off limits lands, said things that we were not allowed to talk about and had to be kept secret. The loudness of the radio was, however, belting out our covert disobedience, putting us in slight danger, as listening to these stations was one of the many forbidden things on the Communist censorship list. The mixed feelings of clandestine excitement and anxiety would seep into my dreams. It was only years later that I fully understood the subversive nature of these programs and the role they played for a nation besieged by its own government. In the few days preceding December 21, 1989, huddled with a couple of friends around a radio again, I listened to a euphoric report on the revolt brewing in Timisoara. Crossing borders and thresholds against all attempts of the secret police to suppress them, the voices on the radio spoke the minds of all those who would not dare make themselves heard.1
What I did understand very early on was that there were people who had gotten out of Romania one way or another and were living and creating abroad, in the free West, maintaining their ties against all odds and feeding the hopes of those left behind. I remember hearing, once in a while, whispered with vicarious but repressed joy, of someone else who had escaped: artists I admired onstage, or friends in my parents' circle. Of course, the rumours would focus on personalities of Romanian culture who sought freedom of speech "on the other side" rather than on the ordinary people who left for socio-economic reasons. Gradually, I came to realize how long the list of intellectual expatriates actually was. The names took on legendary auras: Andrei Codrescu, Liviu Ciulei, Andrei Serban, Lucian Pintilie, Nina Cassian, Magdalena Popa. They joined the ranks of numerous academics and artists who had left since World War II and went on to forge prominent careers outside the tightening confines of Romania: Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Paul Celan, Victor Brauner – the list goes on. Through the second half of the 20th century, "the West" remained an alluring beacon of freedom and an escape for creative minds who knew that staying home would only lead to censorship, marginalization and eventually house arrest (in a best case scenario). Wishing to be individuals rather than comply with the model of the "new man;' many intellectuals traded one utopia for another: they escaped the "new world" of communist ideology by defecting to the "new world" of the European occident or the American dream.
The idea of emigrating was an ongoing whispered discussion in my house, as in many others across Romania. But we never took the leap. Before 1989, for over 40 years, emigration from Romania meant exile. We stayed and I saw things change. My generation woke up in our late teens and early twenties to witness all of the stifling rules being broken and walls lifting – at least in theory. Psychological walls were still there, created both by inner complexes and by outside fears of invasion. Whether for economic reasons, out of a desire to explore or to fulfill a potential that cannot be achieved there, many of my generation are still leaving the country. However, even though some of the reasons they are leaving are the same as those of the two generations before us, some things have changed.
Cultural production now travels freely, though not easily, in both directions. Romanian cinema makes waves on movie screens across the world. Romanian visual artists are invited to international festivals and residencies, while local bienniales and museums bring artists from all over the world to Romanian cities. After years of silence, Western cultural circles are starting to take note of artistic production coming out of this forgotten corner of Eastern Europe. There are probably many valid reasons why it is only now happening, but one of them might be that it took this time to recover a language, a type of discourse that can be shared and understood by others.
In reaction to censorship and ideological constraint, a vocabulary of metaphor and symbolism emerged, cunning enough to sneak through the cracks in state control. Artists and public alike developed special skills: to speak and read between the lines. A common ground of underlying assumptions based on shared experiences was necessary to penetrate the code. Circulation of artistic production outside of the country was inconceivable, further accentuating the insular nature of its vocabulary and the clandestine complicity with its only imaginable audience. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, conversation with others became not only possible, but essential.
However, finding a common ground of dialogue took time and still remains an ongoing process. "One of the reasons why the East and the West don't understand each other sometimes;' Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu points out, "is because they don't understand the subtext; they have a different understanding of what is self-evident in daily life:'2 While many of the Westerners' "self-evidences" remain utopian to the majority of Romanians, the language to articulate both fantasy and difference is starting to emerge. It comes as no surprise that this change manifests itself primarily through the medium of film, which has the capacity to easily cross borders and to reach a wider public. A poignant neo-realism is replacing the loaded allegorical discourse, giving a new voice to stories needing to be told, stories that Romanians need to tell and that audiences on both sides of the border need to hear.
The theme of longing to escape, to reach the West with its promise of freedom, abundance and happiness, still weaves through many of these new films: in California Dreamin' (Endless) (2007), a provincial train station master's daughter, along with half the village population, wants to run away to America; in How I Spent the End of the World (2006), two high school students are training to swim across the Danube and find their way to the free world; while Cristian Mungiu's Occident (2002) tackles head on the crucial dilemma of today's Romanian youth: should I stay or should I go? Subtly ambivalent, Mungiu's first feature film renders a moving portrait of a generation whose limits are being tested, pushed by the economic and psychological context of contemporary Romania. Sooner or later, as they try to find their way to happiness, they face a choice between leaving and staying. They are lost in a society where, as Plesu observes lucidly, "we no longer have the paradoxical joys, both tormented and exalted, produced by the dictatorial universe, but neither do we have access yet to the Westerners' joys. The so-called transition period is, among other things, a crisis of happiness. We are exposed either to sterile nostalgia, or to unfounded hope. So far, the eagerness of synchronizing with the West has brought nothing but the appetite for cheap consumerism, minor or simply trivial pleasure, random and insubstantial joys."3
Those who choose to leave face the challenge of building a new home. Always having to reconcile their past with new cultural territory, they adapt and integrate into a different present, articulating an ever-fluctuating identity. For me, living in the diaspora means living in-between places and cultural contexts, inevitably thinking and creating in that space between. The idea of home becomes a shifting concept, an interiorized place carried along beyond any geographic or political references, as a convergence point inside oneself. However, sometimes a need to connect the disparate dots of my story pushes me to seek links and bridges between the past
I left behind and the present through which I make my way. The space in-between is the place where such connections and dialogue become possible and meaningful, shaping my new identity in relationship to my new home.
New World, the exhibition I organized earlier this year at the Koffler Gallery, stemmed from a desire to explore the history I had lived and the current changes through the lens of visual arts, while creating links with Toronto and the local artistic context. My curiosity regarding the contemporary cultural production in Romania led me to Bucharest-based artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. Their work explores the recent past as well as current political and social attitudes, by looking at the urban landscape of where they live. Their video piece II Mondo Novo (2004) speaks about the expectations and projections one has while standing at the threshold of new beginnings, of new grounds to build on, in that moment where everything is possible.
To further explore the link between my old and my new home and to establish grounds for conversation, I programmed a Toronto based artist as their counterpart in the exhibition: Olia Mishchenko's drawings presented an interesting connection to Vatamanu and Tudor's work as they also depict a world where everything still seems possible – or at least one where everything is attempted, with utopian enthusiasm. Mishchenko shares with Vatamanu and Tudor the experience of growing up in a communist system. She was born in the Ukraine at the time of the Soviet Union and emigrated to Canada as a teenager. She also experienced the transitions and shifting perceptions of place that are inevitable over the course of being uprooted and settling in a new environment. Originating from distinct but overlapping perspectives, the works presented in New World address the turmoil and expectations intrinsic to rebuilding one's life in an unknown territory. While evoking the current circumstances of many Eastern European countries, the exhibition also addressed the impulse to emigrate and change one's outlook, accepting the uncertainties that come with this decision.
Vatamanu and Tudor's II Mondo Novo proposes a simple, albeit powerful metaphor. In the video, a construction site takes on the symbolic meaning of a nation that faces, with wary anticipation, its own political transformation. Through its formal composition, monumental scale and painterly quality, the work references an 18th-century fresco by Giandomenico Tiepolo.4 In Tiepolo's original, a curious crowd gathers in front of a street performer's tent, presumably to view images of the "new world" – the Americas – projected through a new optic invention. Facing the performer's tent, with their backs to the audience, the group blocks our view. In the background, beyond the tent, blue waters and the horizon allude to the fantasy of distant travels. Vatamanu and Tudor's video transposes the group of onlookers to the edge of a construction site, gazing out at a formless terrain. Silent and slowed down to near stillness, the video resembles a mural hesitantly coming to life. Gallery visitors extend the scene beyond the frame of the projection, joining the ranks of the spectators for an obscured view, with no knowledge of what will eventually be there to see. Marking the transition from the old structure to the new layer of architecture underway, the construction site becomes a space of expectation, enticing both the viewers’ gazes, and their subjective projections along with it.
As the reference to the original painting lingers, so does the implication that beyond the immediate socio-political expectations always on the horizon shimmer the dreams of promised lands – the intangible America of Romanians who never left as well as those who live in diaspora but still cannot find it under their feet. Torontonians, many of whom have arrived here from everywhere in the world and are still building a home for themselves, can certainly relate to that. As we move from one part of the world to another, we carry with us the residues of different utopias, of the dreams or crushed hopes that determined our displacement. They mix with our real personal needs and desires and become the material out of which we build our impermanent homes in the space in-between. Between remembrance and longing, we constantly readjust to new grounds in order to actively construct our happiness.
1 Cold Waves (2007), a recenr documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Alexandru Solomon, focuses on the persecution of the Romanian section of Radio Free Europe in the context of the Cold War.
2 Andrei Plesu, About Happiness in the East and the West, and Other Essays (Bucharest: Humanitas lvlultimedia, 2006), audiobook. (quote trans. Mona Filip)
3 Ibid
4 The original among several versions was painted by Tiepolo in 1791 for his villa in Zianigo. The fresco was later painstakingly transferred to the Venetian museum Ca'Rczzonico.