The 2012 Winter issue of All Hollow Magazine published by Griffons and Swans appointed George Robescu to curate a dense interview with me looking at the highs and lows of living in Romania to hyperobjects and the secret life of mass.
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4. You claim Romania has only given you your place of birth. Is that really all it's done for you? Is there something or someone quintessentially Romanian that you care about?
A yes, full of blood. I believe that Romania's hard-line had lost me a while back. Perhaps it is a pathological anger over Romania that can only be born out of being the villain in a vast smelly ocean, where we cannot but smell our meta-odours. I wanted to breathe different oxygen. My social critique looks way back before the revolution where everything started.
I think the generation of my parents for e.g is on the verge of missing the whole point of why they made a revolution in the first place by staying silent towards the past in its relationship to the next generations I think we have a deep problem of formulating our desires. We think there is an outside world that needs adjusting to. I think we left the scar of communism undelt too long, and then we locked it in us, and run away. Maybe an alternative is to co-exist with honesty and forward thinking.
I am outspoken when it comes to someone I truly care which is my partner and sometimes co-conspirator, Razvan Sadean, who agrees with me on the above. We want more than a deplorable ideology, frigid tradition and damn right cultural primitivism. We want more than a dry discourse lacking room for tolerance and respect for minorities or engaged and argumentative individuals. We started to collaborate for different projects and performances at Barbara Seiler Gallery in Zurich, Ze Dos Bois Art Centre in Lisbon —a legendary art space where in the 90’ body artists like Orlan, or Philip Meste showed their works in Atlantico Festival.
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12. How would you describe the local art market? Adrian Ghenie stated that Romanian art is closer to a sociological experiment than to actual contemporary art. Do you agree?
I think that Romanian contemporary art tries sometimes to open doors where there are none to open. We are talking to much about post- communism, reiterating its blockages when we are in need of a theory of reality. If we continue like that we miss the point completely. Why? Because, 'the only way out is in', is not anymore valid, because there is no outside of us that needs to be fixed in order to move forward. To believe that there is an outside of us means to believe in human supremacy in the world.
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7. What are your major themes? Which medium would you like to explore further?
I make art tailored to deal with a problem. My interest is to bring something into the world that doesn't demand from the spectator his understanding, it demands rather his absence, that he not add anything to it. I deal with positions on design, fabrication and occupation of neverhood—the immaterial parameters of design that wants to interact, to come into the texture of now — to design an approach that never was — to design never.
In 2009 I had the idea of building a collective not an individual practice — with a hyperobject — with myself at 29 years old, and since its making we worked with the idea of the present, reality of never, downcycling this fundamental object, of what's what in 'The Artist and Himself at 29'. The fundamental workings of this collective question the way mass makes reality, the secret life of mass. Whatever it is now, cannot be complete if we don't take in consideration its neverness. Just as the object of the world is always on the project board, never makes this object visible. I want to make a better never, as it is not homeless but deeply in ourselves. Looking at 'Pending works' established as work about scale, far beyond any humanist perception — a hyperobject, too large for the city, news, the geography of where we are. It is simply to big, making it impossible to take in all at once. Pending work is the artist at 29. Pending works change the conversation. Dealing a pending work imply many public appearances considered as zero days. One zero day was Public of Stockholm performing Pending Work #7 at IASPIS, keeping moments of silence for a never happened event asks issues of evidence, evoking the law, the observer's paradoxical situation of observing something that cannot be observed, and contemplated, adding no more silence to all the silence in the object, just because the public is not outside of the work, but in the work. There is simply no away, no public to deal with pending work #7 because time has no public and no events to look not to speak of giving credit to any. All termination points, closures are instantaneous and not ends. Pending work is laboured as being a work that is elsewhere, no pending work is here. It brings to the history of thought rather than preserved as mere aesthetic residue.