Documented Performance

Programme of the ARTest Foundation

Documented Performance / Guided Tour

The way a person, now become a persona, measures distance within a city and a community, using their own body, traversing the space – a territory still disputed –, step by step, whilst at the same time leaving traces in recent history, within the collective and the personal memory; the way in which all these elements intertwine, can serve as a tool for unravelling the historical, social and political context, a fact which, in turn, explains and underpins our understanding of the realities we are experiencing right now.  

A natural continuation of a similar gesture having taken place last year in Andrei Ursu’s native Bucharest, during which he – son of the dissident Gheorghe Ursu and former director of the Institute of the Romanian Revolution –will be our guide through a complex city with a turbulent recent history. This time we will be traversing the distance between the flashpoints of the momentous events which shook the city of Târgu Mureș and the entire Transylvanian community, taking place during that ‘Black March’ of 1990. On this occasion, our guide and discussion partner is Csaba-Zoltán Novák, a historian with a doctorate specialising in contemporary and recent history, and a researcher at the Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, alongside whom we will be delving into the historical context, the decisive political, social and ethnic conditions, and the course of events during those few dark days in Târgu Mureș.

The title of our project is to do with our entire body of work, serving as the key to a dialogue conducted over the last six years, articulated through gestures and actions throughout which the production of the artwork is pushed to the margins, making way for activities concerned with elucidation and orientation within the inherited (historical) terrain and the current socio-political context.