Marta Jecu é a autora do presente artigo sobre Alexandru Poteca (1976), um artista romeno que desenvolve a sua obra intervindo sobre objectos de uso diário dos períodos comunista e pós-comunista. A autora do texto (em inglês) está a concluir o doutoramento em Berlim, na Freie Universität, e vive em Lisboa, onde faz investigação sobre alguns artistas portugueses contemporâneos.

Imagine a city, where a long embedded order is suddenly put to an end. It is an order, which is breathing through all the pores of objects, through the smells you encounter when you step inside the houses, through dusty streets and ruined buildings. It is an order which cannot be questioned, since the people are long buried in their daily cooking pans, their clothes, and yellow newspapers, their family albums, umbrellas, their stored medicine bottles, which are looking every night at them from their bedroom table, their skating boots, inherited from their cousins. In this world – the world of Romania’s communist regime – the existence is condemned to be zoomed in concentric areas of interest and attention, to blur every impossible attempt to expand the sight. Here the daily history is frozen. It is a history, without memory – not from the past, which became incommunicable – not from the future, which cannot be other than the communist present. The present, the way Alexandru Poteca recalls it, is a worn out world of objects, the only ones who bear a memory, the only possible memory of their own presence.

Alexandru Poteca’s subject of concern is still not this frozen world, in a complete break of continuity with history – personal, social, cultural, but the break which was changing the order of things and catapulting the Romanian culture with whom he deals, into another present. Alexandru Poteca follows in his project this emergence of another, new present – the post communist one – not through its effable discourse, but through its presence in objects.

In his work-in-progress project, Alexandru Poteca reconstructs a communist apartment from the period 1950-1990 – before and after the communist regime – in which we can encounter most of the standard objects which populated the daily life. He is extracting from a visual repertoire of serial, banal objects, almost identical among themselves, the most obvious and frequent ones, which suddenly become paradigmatic for the cultural landscape of the time. These objects, infinitely multiplied with cheap production means, give shape to the concept of uniformisation – as a prime goal of the communist regime.

At the same time, Poteca is interested in the very personal and specific relations, which took place between people and their objects and environments, the way this relations shaped space and gave birth to infinite unpredictable nuances, along with every particular biography and the unconscious and candid daily use they were subjected to.

Poteca’s procedure is very simple: extracting the objects from a temporal circuit, covering them with a gild of bronze and re-immersing them in their original habitat, while exposing them in their generic spatial and temporal continuum.

The golden cover states the museification of the quotidian: his objects talk about a poetic museification, in a museum of memory. They evoke not only a dimension of urban design, a visual interface of the communist present, but also the dimension of the use, a record of personal, ordinary, standardised and silent daily life, which otherwise will never be worth recording. On the other hand, the fake gold, catchy and empty, evokes the bitter nostalgia of the imposed “Golden Era”, which the communist dictatorship declared insolently. The tactile dimension of these objects, transforms the communist Golden Era with its grandiloquent and grotesque agenda, into a used, consumed, passed detritus, which left behind just gaps, emptiness, and confusion. Alexandru Poteca maintains ambiguity, using the narrative potential of his objects not to tell a story, but to deconspire it, by buried, obscured sensations and a sense of irony.

Poteca doesn’t exhibit his objects, but mostly places them “in situ”, where they belong to –re-connecting them to the Romanian present. His exploration expanded also towards communist objects from other cultural areas, as for example from East Berlin. We can find in his collection of things, also common objects coming from the “West”, who crept by chance into the communist block and were collected, stored or refunctionalised. Their role was to evoke a distant, unknown world and – like a fetish object – to fill the blanks of a deserted quotidian, with a touch of inaccessibility.

His objects deconspire paradoxically the present era in Romania – as organically bound to the communist past: placed in the present environment, his objects fit into the actual structure, correspond and respond to the daily mentality, melt into the urban landscape until invisibility. The post-communist rhythm seems to have a very funky beat. For some, a beat strongly attached to communist political habits, for others an opportunity to renew a before the wars Romanian European glamorous modernism. The inherited objects, slip from one role to another, according to the meaning attached. Their identity is not hybrid, but seems rather dysfunctional and disjunctive. The objects of Poteca seem rather to make us see gaps and absences in time. They were coming with a self awareness from the 1920, were naturalised with a working class touch in the ’60 and stored in a corner or sold under price in the ’90 – but they are simply still ever present, integrated and chameleonic.

The pot flower beside a long ago white, fake-lace curtain, the fly, circling beneath the ceiling, the pale cover of a 70’s car parked for years in front of the block, the in-construction ruins of the cities, there are all the never recyclable dead cells of the Romanian society. Their presence is not affirmative, but negative – they always seem to deny a past and a future, but are still ever present, interfere, are ugly, fall by mistake, slip and break, pop up unwanted in all the cultural, personal, social and political discourses. And as they are (in their way) so much equal with themselves, they seem to cast a shadow of ridiculousness on the claim of distinctiveness of the different political discourses, uttered in their presence.

These objects, with their monstrous lack of memory, due to cultural/personal un-continuity and a never-ending present, subsist now in many houses. These impossible qualities of objects Alexandru Poteca seems to freeze: since they are not affirmable, he freezes and stages through sculptural devices a common habitation ambient, as a negative.  Using the gold leaf technique used in Byzantine art, he obtains reversed ready-mades, which he displays in a fictive museum. The museified objects, with their gold and bronze gilding, shine like fake teeth, and make prominent what they hide: an absence.

Marta Jecu

Alexandru Poteca (1976) lives and works in Romania. His work has been exhibited in various solo- and group exhibitions and was acquired in personal collections.

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