Consuming History

Consuming History is a photographic series presented in the group exhibition Inventing the Truth. On Fiction and Reality, representing Romania at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The project documents a participative show which takes place in a former Soviet bunker near Vilnius Lithuania, where a team of actors, employed by a commercial enterprise, stage traumatic living during communism for locals and foreign tourists alike. The visitors are guided through the following experiences: a propaganda session, KGB interrogation, rudimentary medical examination, fingerprinting, military instruction, shopping in a communist store and having a typical communist meal. The show is not scripted and aims at maintaining a balance between the aggression which is applied to the participants and moments of relieving the pressure, thus avoiding its transformation into another Stanford experiment. Rather than reviving the actual horrors of the Soviet past, the Survival Drama (the name of the show) fictionalizes history and packages it as spectacle to the effect of exemplifying a touristic relationship with the past and the transformation thereof in a product ready for consumption.

The series is presented as 24 photographs printed on duratrans and mounted on light boxes in a row on the wall, suggesting a narrative, filmic development. The images themselves maintain the tension between fiction of reality: on the one hand they refer to the past, but are modern digital images framed according to a cinematic ratio; on the other hand they show a historical staging, but also feature elements - such as haircuts, items of clothing and accessories betraying contemporaneity - which do not add up. A world view mediated by spectacle results from an extensive use of fiction to the point of it becoming social practice/daily life and thus acquiring the weight of reality.