2006
video, 22’49”
In Chicago, in December 2005, Irina Botea asked non-Romanian-speaking students, teachers, and civilians living in the United States, including Turkish, Korean, Canadian, Colombian, and US citizens, to re-enact amateur video footage and television broadcasts of the 1989 Romanian Revolution. In Auditions for a Revolution (2006), the Romanian artist evokes the first major socio-political event to be broadcast live on television for the first time, overturning all previous assumptions about inclusivity.[1] As a testimony to the significance of the event in media history, Vilém Flusser defined the events in Romania at the time as a turn, where “there is no longer reality behind the image. All reality is in the image.”[2] And Baudrillard, in relation to the first “television revolution”, argued that the revolution was taking place on television at the same time as the events were taking place, and that the street had thus become an extension of the studio. This degree of heightened theatricality[3] also means that the versions of the re-enactment of the television revolution in Romania—dramatized, translated into a foreign language, relocated to different spaces—share the repeatable theatricality and the theatrical repetitiveness of the past event, whereby they do not remove but rather generate a whole series of questions.[4] In other words, they not only demonstrate that the theatricality and the dramatic settings are repeatable, but that the act of repetition itself inherently has a kind of dramatic character. The participants have taken on the role of a revolution that has already taken place, in order to deconstruct the enthusiasm of the revolution and critically explore how it is taking place in the present. At the same time, it deconstructs the historical event by means of a reconstruction of media images and amateur video footage, focusing not on the reality/authenticity of historical events, but on the precise recreation of television images, as a kind of meta-commentary. It attempts to recreate the technical characteristics of the original TV broadcast by copying it: colours, camera angles, image and sound quality. The dual screen splits, showing both the original and the re-run, add to our confusion, forcing us to constantly pan and jump. The juxtaposition of Botea’s work revisits the original footage at several points: the presence of girls in the drama group reveals the male dominance in the archival footage, where there are no women in the decision-making situations. Perhaps most striking, however, is the contextual strangeness of the archival Romanian phrases, the slogans of the Romanian revolution, that rain down on the streets of Chicago: “Liberty/Libertate!”; “Truth/Adevărul!”; “We want free elections/Vrem alegeri libere!”. What is impressive about Botea’s re-enactment is the difficulty that the actors had in repeating the dialogues in Romanian, a language they did not speak a word of. All this can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the difficulties of reading history, It can also be understood as a counter-western colonization act.
[1] Baudrillard, Jean: The Timisoara Syndrome: The Télécratie and the Revolution, in: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, D2, 1993, pp. 61–71.
[2] Flusser, Vilém: Television Image and Political Space in the Light of the Romanian Revolution. April 7th, 1990, Budapest, Kunsthalle, lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFTaY2u4NvI&feature=channel_video_title.
[3] “I think it was Lessing who said, ‘The theatre is meant to increase compassion and fear’. So it was, you ask, are the dead bodies we have seen real or not? Whether the water in Timisoara was really poisoned or not? These are bad metaphysical questions. The real experience is in the picture. What happens behind the picture is of no use to us. The political explanation is no longer valid. There is no longer any reality behind the image. All reality is in the image.”, ibid.
[4] Dánél, Mónika: 1989/Románia: újrajátszás, archívum, történelmi esemény, Híd, 2016, 80 (5), pp. 5–30.