R E-ENAC TMENT O F A SU B JEC TIVE HIS TORY
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Every historical cultural moment does not totally belong to itself; in that it is an accumulation of several past events, and will be influencing future.
members (of different nationalities: Koreans, Turks, Americans, Canadians, Israelis etc) to audition for roles in 1989 Romanian revolution, the first televised revolution. The project was born from our viewing together the discussion in the beginning of Antonionii Zabriskie Point’s movie, which ignited a debate on the possibility of having a revolution at that time. During the same period I started watching Andrei Ujica and Harun Farocki’s movie, “Videograms of
a Revolution”. I thus felt the urge of a personal “closure”. The movie aims mainly at analyzing our participation in what we call “Romanian Revolution” and the meaning of revolutionary identity. By re-enactment, the performers try the “revolutionary identity” and learn “the revolutionary vocabulary”. By using a language that the performers didn’t quite understand (even though I have provided them the translation), the
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words become abstracted and their meanings are questioned. The use of terms such as democracy, socialist etc. is obviously reconsidered in the fragment where the 1989 “revolutionaries” they try name the new political structure they have just constituted. The viewer is provoked to compare the new performance with the original 1989 footage, and to consider such questions as the construction versus the spontaneous unfolding of historical
Before A National Anthem video selection, 80min, 2009 (3)
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