The project launches a meditation on political connotations that landscape received in time, on the frontiers and politics of urban and natural landscapes, on land art and ecological art of thé last century as forms of resisting cultural and political censorship and of thé traces dictatorship left on Romanian landscapes.

The project follows certain key moments of the representation of the landscape in the last century in the cultural history of Romania and the way in which it was transformed into a way of expression of a political, cultural or aesthetic credo. Archive visual documents from the national museum of the Romanian peasant, Bucharest are examined in relation with contemporary works of art – in the exhibition presented at the Romanian Cultural Centre in Lisbon. The way the landscape was and is lived, viewed, reproduced and disseminated reveals different cultural agendas with a political, social or cultural substratum from different epochs in the recent history of Romania.

"ON Landscape" has as its starting point the photographs of Alexandru Tzigara-Samurcaș, founder of the Museum of Ethnography and National Art in Bucharest (1906) and a great landscape photographer. Its images with a bucolic and timeless nature are invested as a symbol of a perennial rural identity, which was seen as a foundation of the Romanian nation, during the period when Romania began to represent itself at universal exhibitions and was seeking for a coherent expression of its cultural identity.

The collection of archival photographic documents will also include some images from the communist period, when the landscape disappeared almost completely from the official propaganda. An artificial 'representation' of landscape turned to be an accessory of the socialist peasant, who was completely detached from nature and was assimilated to the image of the communist urban 'worker'.

Objetives

• Lecture of Portuguese Poet Nuno Judice
• Group exhibition with Historic and contemporary artists at the Romanian Cultural Institute, Lisbon

Research Team

Marta Maria Jecu (PI)

Partners

• Instituto Cultural Romeno, Lisboa
• The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Bucharest(MNȚR)
• Galeria Posibilă Bucharest
• Anca Poterașu Gallery
• Ivan Gallery Bucharest