The Poetics of Politics - The Bucharest School of Photography: Group exhibition with work by Michele Bressan, Dani Ghercā and Nicu Ilfoveanu

Many of Bucharest’s eclectic buildings – some more run-down than others – were destroyed or repurposed in the wave of liberalization that followed the revolution. In his series ‘Waiting for the Drama’ (2010), Michele Bressan captures various cinemas throughout the country prior to their demolition or transformation into bingo halls, (strip)clubs, parking spaces or shopping centers. Bressan does not take pictures of the projection screen, but instead turns his camera to the deserted room. The empty seats, outlined in the semi-darkness, and the eeriness of the scene, evokes a memento mori or last tribute to cinema. When Bressan started this series in 2010, out of the 290 state cinemas in Romania only 29 were left. By 2020, none of them were used as a cinema anymore.  

In its striving to modernize the country, the Romanian government launched the so-called RABLA programme in 2005. Owners of cars that were older than ten years could exchange their vehicle for a voucher with which they could purchase a new one. Especially owners of Dacia’s from the 70s and 80s – a Romanian brand that was the only available option for those who could afford it – were eager to get rid of their old car. Michele Bressan visited one of these scrapyards where the Dacia’s – once the pride of the nation – were reduced to an abstract heap of scrap metal. 

Leaving Bucharest for the rest of the world, the communist past for the neo-liberal present, and a frontal view for an aerial one, Dani Ghercã’s series ‘A Glimpse of Disconnection’ (2021-ongoing) consists of pictures of various metropolises taken from a helicopter; aerial portraits of the simultaneous connectivity and loneliness that characterize contemporary urban space. Each skyline becomes interchangeable, reduced to abstractions, composed of form, color, and light. The pictures are not taken at night – as the almost pitch-black compositions would suggest – but during the daytime, in contre-jour, which explains why they all look underexposed. The odd shiny details are reflections of metal and copper elements embedded in the buildings’ roofs and facades. This dense network of lines and surfaces does not evoke the shape of a gigantic motherboard by accident. ‘A Glimpse of Disconnection’ is a visual embodiment of the ideal of the interconnected metropolis and its constant flow of data, which is omnipresent but remains invisible. By revealing these hidden circuits in his digital pictures, Ghercã draws on something akin to the magic of analogue photography; the golden moment when pictures are developed in the dark room and reveal what is there, but is not always visible to the naked eye.