Tag Archives: romania
2420 – Yaga (2019 game)
Yaga is an authentic love letter to childhood fables from Romanian indie developer,Breadcrumbs Interactive. ● Bludgeon the ancient monsters of Slavic folklore using a vast arsenal of hammers and tools forged by Ivan’s own hands. ● Your actions change Ivan’s story, his reputation, and the upgrades he can choose.
The world of Yaga is a world steeped in folklore and ancient Pagan beliefs. Featuring a head-bobbing Romanian hip-hop soundtrack from Subcarpați and striking, hand-drawn 2D artwork.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (MINIMUM): Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system / OS *: Windows 7, 8, 10 / Processor: Intel CPU Core i3-2500K 2.0GHz+ / AMD CPU Phenom II 570 / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: GeForce 8800 GTX, GT640, GT730, Radeon HD 5850, HD Graphics 530 / DirectX: Version 10 / Storage: 3 GB available space / Sound Card: Stereo
2418 – Time of Darkness and Silence (1982) by Nina Gladitz (Holocaust documentary with EN sub)
8th of April Romani Day
The 8th of April is the International Romani Day, “a day in which to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people” – as Wiki says. But then so should be any other day, why just one day? At the same time, the liberal idea under capitalism that everybody has to be ‘integrated’ and accepted – turned out to be just lip service, without much substance. Romanian (but also Bulgarian, altough I do not pretend to speak in the name of other neighboring countries but wr should know more of this history) history is also deeply implicated in the subjugation and enslavement of Romani people and even naming the Romani as “țigan” (basically similar to the racial slur “nigger” in the States) is still being used and thrown around, but educational articles start changing that.
‘You were born of the French Street’
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.
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).
2398 – UAP Romanian Socialist symposia (ost: Kate Bush Running on the Hill)
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
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2187 – #AfterExtractivism Berliner Gazette 2022 (video talks)
In today’s world of broken tech/content cultural cycles where oligarchic, tech billionaire or strongmen rule, unchecked megalomania and institutionalized greed tends express itself nowadays as “concern” about freedom or fighting against PC and censorship but ends in layoffs and users migrating from one temporary heaven to another. It is as Ada Palmer put – getting meta, a place where one used to tweet about various meltdowns – Twitter – is itself tweeting about its own meltdown. Well TW was itself stuck in the verbal and textual (if minute and 200 character limit) turn. People move to Mastodon and this is not something that should surprise us.
There is even talk about returning to Tumblr and who knows, maybe a renewed interest in worn-out formats such as WordPress. With that in mind I will post a few short talks on various subjects related to green transitions from fossil fuel as East /West manifold, climate justice, the Capitalocene, resource depletion and greenwashing from the #AfterExtractivism series an appendage to the Berliner Gazette. I participated with an article and a video in one on these, but I urge you to check the others too – they are dense, interesting and quite urgent. They range I said from the history of empires, system of sacrificial (based on human sacrifice) economy – of vegetal greases in the Atlantic Slave trade and British Industrial and Colonial history or today’s infamous petro-states of the Gulf and their futuristic imagery. They are quite short, ~ 10 minutes to 18, and quite to the point, so they might be worth your while, even if it’s talking heads – a situation I also often find annoying.
More info: after-extractivism.berlinergazette.de
Stefan Tiron 1989 / 2147
Connecting post-1989 worker struggles in Romania’s coal mining region with Captain Power and a group of guerrilla fighters who oppose the machine forces that dominate Earth in the 22nd century following the so-called Metal Wars, artist, author, and curator Stefan Tiron inquires in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism” into the political potential of science fictional transitioning in the 1990s.
Max Haiven · Palm Oil
While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a global shortage of sunflower oil, propelling palm oil to rise again, a critical look at the global history of the palm oil industry reveals both the imperial violence of extractive capitalism as a system of human sacrifice and the challenges for a transition into a just world, social thinker Max Haiven argues in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
Stoyo Tetevenski · European Green Deal
The case of Bulgaria reveals: what is sold as the ultimate way out – namely, the “green” transition – opens new spaces for accumulation. The cost of this is to be borne by society, especially by workers in old industries. Thus, the challenge is to advance post-capitalism, as environmental justice activist Stoyo Tetevenski argues in his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
Manuela Zechner · Earthcare
While ecological and economic systems are collapsing, a battle for white supremacy is raging; it is not least a class war for (controlling) access to the shrinking living space on the planet. It is high time to counter this development with a radical politics of earthcare, as feminist researcher, facilitator, and artist Manuela Zechner
Katarina Kusic · The Yugoslavia Lesson
The suffering caused by extractive capitalism has people looking back to Yugoslavia’s modernization project. While aiming to dominate nature, it also created cooperative platforms for social togetherness, enabling sustainable ways of living and organizing economy.
Julio Linares · Climate and Debt
Fighting for debt cancellation and environmental justice in the Global South, the question is how we can wager our future on the legacies and claims of those who – then as now – have been plunged into existential hardship by the ecological-economic complex. In his contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism,” economic anthropologist Julio Linares is looking for answers in Latin America.
Özgün Eylül İşcen · Gulf Futurism
After the Gulf boom propelled the growth both of the region and of oil-devouring economies in the West, new realms of capitalist expansion are being developed along the lines of green capitalism’s smartness mandate, ultimately reproducing the lasting systemic crisis of which Dubai is somewhat representative, media theoretician Özgün Eylül İşcen argues in her contribution to the Berliner Gazette’s video talks series “After Extractivism.”
2124 – Introduction to China’s mysteries (dezarticast 2022)
Out of respect for the majority of our (English-speaking) visitors, I tried to avoid posting Romanian language materials or RO posts. This time I am making an exception – here is a recent talk on the Romanian Youtube Channel Dezarticulat666 I was invited to participate in. They also have a Twitch channel if you practice this sport. Dezarticast has a mind-blowing diverse range of topics, generally focusing on media, environmental politics, environmental justice, labor rights, cultural labor, the so-called ‘creative industries’, openly discussing working conditions, unionization, exploitation and political economy. What I consider vital is their post-ironic, mediatic and tech-savvy approach to all of the above – I think today it is counter-productive (even suicidal) to not be able to discuss current politics, militarism, refugee crisis, populism without taking into account sucy media as comics, movies, musical videos or web03, tech solutionism or crypto scams, or radical UFOlogy, algo-empowered haterizm or meme magick.
While the discussions was free floating and provocative, sure to be controversial take on a few hot topics in today’s multipolar world, there’s a lot left out to be covered in future podcasts, with different guests & and their experiences. I feel highly indebted to A. Rautoiu for making the invitation and for editing the final material. Here is some of the things discussed:
00:00:00 – Intro
00:06:07 – The mazine „New China” (here is a resource of China Reconstructs mag) from the 1980s
00:09:00 – Chinese mass culture in the 1980s Romania
00:12:05 – the 2008 Financial Crisis and how Adi Schiop became interested in China
00:21:03 – Sinophobia and the COVID-19 pandemics
00:22:43 – multidimensional China
00:23:31 – „Maoism a Global History” by Julia Lovell
00:26:10 – „How China Escaped Shock Therapy” by Isabella M. Weber
00:27:06 – Other informational sources about China
00:30:12 – The polycrisis of today’s China
00:37:55 – Romanian translations from Chinese literature authors
00:40:12 – Chinese SF, especially Liu Cixin
00:47:20 – The way the CCP incorporates criticism & dissent
00:50:41 – Dissidence and popular resistance against the party
00:56:52 – China’s relation with the rest of the world as compared to now
01:03:01 – Maoism in the rest of Asia
01:06:54 – Asian states that developed under dictatorships (including a dirigiste tech leveraging by state institutions establishing development goals in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea)
01:10:34 – Sinophobia in a larger context of anti-Asian xenophobia
01:16:24 – Conclusions
Other China resources:
Sixth Tone (news culture, politics, trends, economy, trends, etc.) this is one of the few very good portals on lots topics including LGTBQ+ and feminist issues as well as daily aspects of life in China.
Sofia Horta’s TW (Bloomberg) weekly thread on China’s economy, policies, stocks, trends her bombardmenf article again gives me the impression that it’s about China’s importance (or risk management) in Western (investors) eyes, still its vital to keep track and put on these “glasses”.
Global Times (PRC official positions, foreign policy, analysis, etc) it might seem like opaque if one does not actually read btw the lines, yet again it is one of these rare insider perspectives. It also offers quick short 3m videos with recent news (similar to Scmp). Invaluable as to official party line I would say.
South China Morning Post (news portal, international and China news, HK Asia and China focused) as Adi S s-a d its already part of the Alibaba consortium and has a certain independence and works as permitted alternative to the above.
Discourse Power substack (by Tuvia Gering a research fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, and a Tikvah’s Krauthammer Fellow, specializing in Chinese security and foreign policy, and emergency and disaster management.). It’s about ‘discourse power’ – and how this is becoming a job advertising the capacity to read China’s entrails. I am pretty cautious of such efforts (since there’s always a bidding going on) but i appreciate the translation effort.
TimeSpace Warps 
