It is even hard – even in my family, coming from an east-bloc intelligentsia background (father sculptor, mother soprano), the word “gypsy” had its usual racist connotations, but it was used more in the sense of ‘underdeveloped’ or rather a slightly colonialist ‘uncivilized’ which of course completely ignored the ways Romani were supposed to be still nomads that need to become sedentary. But the pressure to ‘urbanize’, to build and produce socialism was particularly harsh on women and minorities. In my family the phrase “You were born on the ‘French Street'” (Te-ai născut pe Franceza) was a euphemism for the Romani street in the village of my mother’s side grandpa (a worker welder). They were constantly joking and accusing each other of being born there which was supposedly a way to put you down the social ladder. The interesting thing is the way the French were supposedly synonymous with ‘high culture’ in Romania (in the Interwar period as well as during Communism). So calling the Romani village street ‘French’ was supposed to be an outrage, was meant to be initially off-putting, but also, underneath, to admit that mixed couples were happening and that everyone could have Romani ancestors. A was an admission that a clear dividing line did not exist, and also a play or satire on high/low culture ideals (or this is how I understand it).
They were slaves in Romania for hundreds of years, longer than slaves existed in the US. In Bulgaria, the situation was somewhat similar from what I understand and Romani escaped to the Ottoman Empire before where they could be free.
Keep thinking of this document, where 27 Roma families, that is 117 human beings in total, adults and children, were sold between two wealthy individuals in mid-19th century Moldavia, for the price of about a head of cattle each.
Here is a very important documentary that I truly recommend and that has been long unavailable or only reluctantly so it seems (in Germany). It is not only a movie about the plight of the Romani victims of the Holocaust (together with Jewish, queer/lesbian, as well as Communists and Anarchists), but also an indictment of the autonomy of the arts and the doctrine that artists are ‘Gods’, existing above politics, above accountability, above historical events, basically outside of history. This pernicious view is popular in Germany and elsewhere, while things changed, it is still part of an official cult of artistic ‘geniuses’ and cultural elites that tries to keep “Kultur” untarnished by its miserable associations, and one that continues to whitewash and justify many abuses. There’s a direct line that leads from the authenticity and separation of fhe artist from everything else and fascism. While artists have been hunger artists, or even thrown out of the polis (Plato), or declared degenerated and pathologized (Max Nordau), there’s something very wrong with upholding the unicity of the artist – that in the end acts like mercenary at the disposal of different regimes and powerful protectors.
It is the story of the Romani survivors of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and how Tante “Leni” Riefenstahl, well known Nazi propagandist filmmaker director, producer, screenwriter, editor, and photographer used them as extras in one of her wartime movies (Tiefland) before they were sent to the extermination camps. Don’t mean to be disprespectful to the survivors, but I could not help myself thinking ‘Tante’ Leni making Dune instead of Villeneuve, and using Romani extras as Fremen (maybe this does not forbode well for the next Dune installment).
This is one of my favorite detournement videos by Victor Plastic, an infamous digital media and dead media analog archivist from Romania who collects forgotten recordings, tapes, pop culture gems, games anything that escaped the Digital Dark Ages. I am really glad the video is still up and that I was able to find it after some lengthy search. Everyone is of course free to interpret the video however one likes, but below I will try to give some context.
CONTEXT
I was one of those kids who spent much of my childhood from the late 1970s through the 1980s and early 1990s (basically all summer vacations) not in Scout summer or Bible camps, but at artist Union symposia, sculpture parks, Seaside Artist collective homes or “Tabere” (literally camps) as part of the UAP network. Uniniunea Artistilor Plastici – the Artists Union spelled for short UAP like the English Unidentified Aerial Phenomena is now somehow despised or seen as an epitome of conservative ideas by the young generation, its name associated as a throwback to another era. It now stands accused of nepotism and crooney capitalism. But before we rush to that conclusion let us consider that it used to offer an important economic (and welfare) support and was a viable cultural infrastructure that spread throughout Socialist and post-socialist Romania (other Socialist countries had similar structures). After 1989 attempts at privatization and accruing costs (unpaid gas and electricity tabs) basically made the union close down its spaces, transform them into commercial spaces, sell or foreclose them, or even evict the artists who started to lose their aura of ‘living national treasures’.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
This Union was quite powerful at the time and had a lot of bargaining power because it represented all painters, all sculptors, all decorative and monumental art (think about the Yugoslav and Bulgarian brutalist monuments and fabulous mosaic art) practitioners and under Socialism in Eastern Europe. Also all official art was done by UAP artists. So even if you were not allowed to be openly critical of the party and its leader and you were supposed to represent the values of communism and of progress, you had a lot of liberty (especially in Hungary) and supportive structures as backups, exhibition spaces, free ateliers (although some more central or bigger than others). You could also do a tour exhibiting around the country and you could travel from one city to another with all expenses being paid. It was really an ideal deal if you consider the austerity politics of the times and the later shock therapy years. Most importantly you also had a community to support you that would visit the exhibitions and also the willing state that was also regularly buying works from you on a yearly basis.
Of course, there were guiding lines and even preferred styles (pressure to conform to Socialist Realism went in and out of fashion over the years). From a purely experiential perspective as a young kid, it was amazing to hang out with the local cowherd shepherds and countryside kids and take turns caring for the animals, learning to dodge kicks from animals that you never encountered in a city environment. I was also the first generation and 2nd of city-born kids on both sides of the family. The same was true for the countryside kids – taking up sculpture and drawing and actually joining in with the sculpture. Food was also excellent in a time of penury, wine, and slivovitz (tzuica) were aplenty, and most of the artists were former peasants themselves (my father included – or at least he never lost the skills he learned as a kid – how to milk, etc) who made the jump from the land to the city/university.
ARTISTS OF THE PEOPLE
Most of these very masculine and quite sexist at times groups were also fishermen, occasional hunters or seasoned mushroom pickers and knew how to build their own furniture and design and build their own houses or make their own clothes. It was also the reality that this was a time when the artist was a special creature – an “artist of the people”, some sort of national treasure, treasured almost like handicraft artists still are in Japan nowadays. They were spoiled in the best of ways, had plenty of food and booze all the time, and feasting was done at almost middle-age levels with wildfowl, freshly hunted deer (that was mostly reserved for the party apparatchiks), and plenty of wild mushrooms from the forest and excellent bread from ovens. Also, local party bureaucrats, and benevolent mayors, were happy to act like art patrons. They loved talking and spoiling these bizarre and quite brazen artists with the best products of the land. Another thing to remember – having a beard or long hair was a big nono in that era, you could lose your job or get even caught by the police (or Milicia how it was then called) and forcefully shaved.
That is not to say that women did not play an important role and even this hierarchy of textile art ranking lower than the other art – overlapping hierarchies (particularly in regards to North South relations) did not exist so clearly in opinion. There were collaborations btw textile factories and large-scale textile art done by both genders (for example see the great piece “Theatre of the Heart” inside the National Theatre done by Florin CIUBOTARU si Serban GABREA btw 1969-1979). This was part of a series that included “War and Peace” and “Ode to the Country”. There were many women artists and even families of artists (art was a dynastic thing) and art historians and critics. Independent of gender, everyone basically painted or went “la peisaj” to paint landscapes. Many women participated in the neo-avant-garde and only later got the recognition they merited (thinking here of Lia Perjovschi or Geta Bratescu). To end this long digression, some of these camps still exist, and now they are mostly linked to what could be called land art or have turned towards more or less openly ecological concerns. Some of them are still touted to keep up the spirit of the times, mostly dependent on local artistic networks and long-term friendships. I always meant to join one of them near Bistrita, but never did.
NEO BARBARIANS
This video also compares two pop cultural expressions that were roughly contemporaneous. One was glamorous, quite urban, and entering the pop charts. While across the Iron Curtain in Romania, you had these strange bearded hordes of ‘alternative’ men. I am using the word ‘alternative’ under scare quotes because they were really odd in retrospect, not really workers, peasants, or intellectuals, nor counterculture members in the sense of artists boho chic from the West (think NY Greenwich Village). They enjoyed a kind of uneducated and anti-intellectual and cultivated look of ‘wildness’ (they all pretended they were uneducated even if they had a good cinema culture and were bibliophiles). They also preferred an image of the unsophisticated noble “barbarian”. They were some sort of Stone Age Socialist neo-barbarians using self-made tools (I remember those incredible wooden hammers), close to natural materials (stone, wood) in wild countryside surroundings (not really the wilderness of the Wild West) but some sort of Arcadia impossible utopia setting of the Renaissance or classical times. They now seem somehow neo-pagan in their pastoral landscape and interest in non-European art always ranked high (they also had the Meridiane publishing house who translated a lot of the most important art historical materials such as Panfosky, Arnheim, most of the French Annales longue duree school books). Every artist’s home had a library with those books. Religion was not really present apart from the usual orthodox icon-making business, and religion was frowned upon, but there was always some sort of mystical attitude. Some groups fused the abstract with the religious (Horia Bernea) or dabbled in Neo-Byzantinism (see Sorin Dumitrescu and Anastasia Publishing House).
PEASANT ARCHETYPES
And now for these memorial houses, countryside retreats, and artistic summer camps. They were indeed incredible places because they fostered a sort of mixed ideal existence in the middle of the forests sometimes with all the local kids and the rural community having active contact with the artists. Lazarea depicted here is a very interesting case since it is actually situated in the Hungarian enclave in Romania. The “rural” always had a difficult status in countries that were predominantly agrarian but were prioritizing industrialization, high modernism, and proletarian culture. The peasant was more a revolutionary subject in the Global South (see Vietnam, India, or especially Maoist China) than in the former Soviet Union or the East Bloc. It is important to understand that this idealized image of the farmer or Taranul Roman “Romanian peasant” was easily used by racist proto-fascist constructions of genetic and ethnic purity btw the wars. Eugenics and miscegenation discourse were so popular in Romania’s 1920s that pseudo-scientific anti-semitic marriage counseling books written by countryside doctors in Romania warned against peasants mixing with despised ‘others’ (who at that time meant mostly the Jewish or Rroma population associated with slavery or the corrupt city). There were echoes of inter-war Eugenics in the later pronatalist policies of Ceausescu-era Romania.
PRODUCTIVIST RATHER THAN CONSTRUCTIVIST
The socialist state project was also interesting not as much as a constructivist but a productivist social project that would eventually usher in new anti-capitalist relationships, transformative for both society, sexuality, and humanity as a whole (as Bogdan Popa explores in his recent book De-centering Queer Theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War). It is not a mystery any longer that across the Iron Curtain in the former West “Cultural Cold War” was raging, and the CIA was also sponsoring and actively supporting modern art against Socialism Realism. After the Cold War had ended, we have to reckon with the fact that only abstract and avant-garde was ‘recovered’ and integrated by the art market forces. It was much more convenient for financial speculation to sift the art collections in search of forgotten members of the avant-garde than it was to appreciate the value of Realism Socialism. The work of artists that straddled the divide btw avant-garde and Socialism Realism is a particularly interesting case study, as demonstrated by the project of Miklos Szilard “Mattis Teutsch: Avantgarde and Constructive Realism” (exhibited in both Budapest and Bucharest). e
Probably this is one of the most expected pieces of SF this year. And it delivers and is excellent on several accounts, contrasting with most of what gets labeled as SF nowadays. There is no lack of visually stunning cinematic works that seem to lack something – be it plotwise, involvement, or character development or are bound to repeat some form of techno-orientalist cliche with super-advanced yet missing Asians.
Is there any type of exoplanetary SF possible today when most of the future visions are somehow retro vintage SF golden age or very derivative? This was contradicted at the end of 2023 by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner with a new independent, daring SF “eco-gothic” SF series production for the Max video-on-demand subscription channel that emanated out of the Californian animation industry. Scavengers Reign has somehow demonstrated that not everything is being consumed by the Disney Studios monster. Although I doubt there’s life after you fall into the D sarlacc’s capacious stomach.
Scavenger Reign stands closer to the European animation school and in particular the French comics and animation. It oozes Métal Hurlant and René Laloux with the geometric forests, panoramic vistas and its changeling alien ecosystems. But there is certainly also an anime/manga aspect – or the traces of the best of anime and manga. There is a touch of weird naturalism, of eerie transformations, and of horrific metamorphosis, particularly if one thinks in terms of the Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira from 1982 which was stunning for its realism and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga (not anime!) by Hayao Miyazaki. Biological genomes get hijacked, and the extended virome that permeates alien planets trafficks information across the species barrier. Everything is inter-species, everything sporulates, and telekinetic parasitism abounds (something close to the rove beetle eating baby ants while the ants think it is one of them – thx Ben Woodard for reminding me of this crazy true fable), but also the dance of co-evolution.
It is also the first US SF product (with help from South Korean animators – Studio JDD) – and it is no accident that it is an animation piece that finally does justice to some authors that have never been adapted for the screen such as the exoplanetary works of Joan Lyn Slonczewski (The Children Star) or only partially so – Jeff VanderMeer (particularly Borne and The Strange Bird two of my favorite pieces of new weird & postapocalyptic post- biopunk SF).
Otherness participates here at every level – from hallucinations of even the most common kind, say your lover’s voice and image that is being somehow puppeteered by something really different (do not think Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), a plethora of really alien creatures using human carriers via their feelings and thoughts, but these thoughts and feelings somehow animating the alien critters as well in return. To affect means to be also affected (thinking here of Deleuze, but also Whithead’s Critique of Pure Affect). Also, we should not expect alien sentience to conform to our technological imaginary – it can be really very much a creature of strange and lowly appetites, irrespective of its extra sensorial powers. So you could really imagine the corporate alien slugs from Charles Stross’s Accelerando leaving sticky marks on Scavengers Reign’s world.
It is also one animation that takes into account our new scientific knowledge about species being as complex communities, interplays, or choreographies of genes or societies of genes of entirely different species. This knowledge constantly reshaped our understanding of what an individual being is or offers us continuous glimpses into how tight-knit such relationships are or how human agency or artificial agency dissolves or is being constantly rerouted within these webs of agency, non-agency, and misplaced intentionality. Parasitism is pervasive but it is also just one expression of the complexity and mutualism of such an ecosystem – it’s fleas upon fleas all the way down and up. There’s also a bizarre in-betweenness, much on this planet actually thrives on cross-fertilization with non-alien, human intruders and their creations (robots). There is a great scene where Azi and Levi (a human and robot partnership that survived the crash of the Demeter 277 cargo ship) who was cultivating and gardening new earthly gardens – Azi the robot is itself a walking garden. Inside its machinery there is some kind of new hybrid semiconductor with slime molds as a partner (it seems to me), maybe something close to unconventional computing is aiming at since some time.
I appreciate all the examples of outsider artists (Darger, Adolf Wölfli or the efforts of Jean Dubuffet and others to highlight works by psychiatric patients) and independent directors, animators and young cinematographers going against all odds, against the aesthetic canon or against financial (sometimes from their former colonial masters) or formal limitations, or trying to not succumb to general precarious and exploitative conditions of cultural workers. At the same time what is completely lacking in this video is a sort of collective understanding of creativity or open culture and how exactly AIs or algos get trained on such bountiful public supplies put out by millions if not billions of us (not just artists) together.
A lot of the avant-garde abstract and intellectually challenging art or deemed non-commercial actually became not less monetized but more so with artworks, especially Western artworks that like coins tended towards greater and greater realms of abstraction. Instead of eschewing or making a virtue out of impoverishment or abstinence maybe there should have been some room for highlighting works that exemplify the economics of the art market in the 20th century .
I understand that such capitalist appropriation cannot be fought outside of the very copyright regime and IP rights it supposedly protects, but it somehow misses the point of such class or collective action lawsuits. Today there is more and more clear that artificial intelligence is grown fat on a privatizing large chunk of the general intellect, and the result is often neither artificial (being trained by human, or on human-derived materials), fair nor intelligent (because without humans supervision it is liable to make gross mistakes and reinforce systemic racism and red-lining). Even the works from the public domain are being used to train AIs.
Such edgelord exclusive focus on the outsider status or on the few that made it into the art canon (including heavies like Van Gogh) risks misunderstanding both old and new currents and ends up junking all the no-name fluctuations, crazy metamorphoses, and fan-economy phenomena. Everyone tends to lump all platforms together (Meta=FB=Tiktok), but since not only users, celebs and fans start to make distinctions and migrate from one to the other – but also geostrategic interests are involved, it is useless to just point at some vague faceless surveillance capitalism. We see this for example on banning Chinese ownership of the Tik Tok in the US and the intense bad press it got lately in correlation with its very success and popularity boost (not to mention other Chinese platforms that are somehow completely ignored by mainstay social platform analysis). How can you avail yourself of old financing structures while at the same time enthusiastically promoting new ones like crowd-funding or bitcoin (let us create monetization schemes based on fans – yeah, but how original is that I ask)?
Sorry for the rant, but this completely avoids the elephant in the room, what is happening with pop culture at this very moment – and how such paean to authenticity basically trash pop culture two times in a row: 1) by denying differences, attractions (even predatorial ones) or characteristics of the existing video platforms 2) by actually homogenizing, ignoring or pasting over and executing the very mechanisms of cultural homogenization it seeks to combat.
TimeSpace Warps 
