5 Suitcases

Private history in public spaces. This is a double rooted project. One root stays in the ground of the Art History (namely the Romanian art history of the last 50 years). The other is mobile, traveling with us across Europe, in 5 suitcases.

Root 1. We were working for some years already as editors of "Arta", the only art magazine of our home country, when some obscure reasons determined the publisher (the Union of Artists from Romania) to terminate the publication (in August 1993). Over night, we found ourselves in the street, sitting on a pile of stuff which included about 600 kg of photographs and negative films. Accumulated since 1953, the year when "Arta" was launched and Stalin died (no connection, really), that material had a tormented history of removals, re-sizing, transfers of property which transformed a potential database into a burden.

Root 2. In 1995, while living in Berlin, we started to process that material and tried to convert it into something fertile. That is how the Art History Archive project was born, as a series of events meant to exploit the oppressive fascination of data and to play with the magic of authority surrounding Archives.

When time came to explore the negatives, what we got at first was a series of somehow deceiving proof prints of art reproductions from Romanian art, starting with the hottest period of the Socialist Realism and ending somewhere in the 80s. What saved those images from being just reproductions was precisely the fact that they were all framing the subject in a wrongly generous manner. Therefore art was just a centered detail, dominated by an interfering field of events, objects, people speaking about the flux of history perceived as a flux of information. The cropping was the standard procedure for cleaning the surrounding mess in pre-printing phase.

We decided that our part will be to do a counter-cropping and "edit" the negatives like movies, by cutting off the predictable parts and enlarging the "messy" details.

Art, time, and social representation. This is how the 5 Suitcases are born. Four of them contain - each - one of the cardinal fields around the art object, enlarged in the way that backgrounds of Renaissance portraits are enlarged in expensive albums of reproductions. The fifth suitcase, smaller, contains the whole image, as a witness.