The walls were cold
September 2023- January 2024
This photographic project aims to address a painful topic of recent Romanian history, examining the conditions experienced by orphaned children within communist and post-communist institutions. Using a gentle, but investigative approach, I visited a former orphanage in Bușteni in an attempt to grasp the failure of this system. While acting both as a researcher and photographer, I gathered small pieces of a story that I believe has been surrounded by collective amnesia. This work is driven by my position as an outsider looking in and trying to understand a wound of my own culture.
It’s 2023, and “Shame of a Nation: The Story of Genocide by Neglect” is written with big black letters on my screen. My laptop screen carries this message and awaits my click on the reportage below it. My stomach clenches. I do not want to know why Americans in 1990 attributed the phrase “Shame of a Nation” to Romania. Still, I want to know. I want to look. I want to see what the Americans saw. I want to see my country with American eyes. But my heart breaks with a deafening echo as I watch this video. I close my eyes, but the images still follow the darkness behind my eyelids that should have protected me. My eyelids no longer protect me. I have looked horror in the eye, and now my body has absorbed it.
excerpt from my research paper “my eyelids no longer protect me”
As part of my installation in Grey Space in the Middle, The Hague (18-21 January 2024), visitors could listen to this audio piece I did, which came to life not only for providing more context, but also because I wanted to include the critical and entitled American view on this Romanian issue, as well as the multiplicity of perspectives on this matter.
