Garda de Fier/ Iron Guard
The video presents scenes from a wedding ceremony projected together with the famous execution video of Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu, portraying the violent transition from communism to capitalism with all of its differences and contradictions.
The videos are showing the trial and execution of the communist leader, symbolically seen as the end of the communism, juxtaposed against an abundant wedding presenting the excesses of capitalism. The video is striking in its depiction of the switch between the two opposite systems, making strong remarks on the Romanian subculture with its use of manele music: DJ Sebi - Garda de fier - a party manele repertoire inspired song about working abroad, leaving the country in order to make money and engage in a very materialistic way of living, in contrast to the Communist songs about socialism.
The contradictions between the scene of the formation of an union and the dissolution of another, the birth and the death, between the austerity and excess, the callous and the compassionate, the end and the beginning, the crucial and necessary with the irrelevant and insignificant are underlining to the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
This video installation was displayed together with Life (and death) under totalitarianism-cum-sultanism in September 2019 in Treforest, Wales.
The video presents scenes from a wedding ceremony projected together with the famous execution video of Elena and Nicolae Ceaușescu, portraying the violent transition from communism to capitalism with all of its differences and contradictions.
The videos are showing the trial and execution of the communist leader, symbolically seen as the end of the communism, juxtaposed against an abundant wedding presenting the excesses of capitalism. The video is striking in its depiction of the switch between the two opposite systems, making strong remarks on the Romanian subculture with its use of manele music: DJ Sebi - Garda de fier - a party manele repertoire inspired song about working abroad, leaving the country in order to make money and engage in a very materialistic way of living, in contrast to the Communist songs about socialism.
The contradictions between the scene of the formation of an union and the dissolution of another, the birth and the death, between the austerity and excess, the callous and the compassionate, the end and the beginning, the crucial and necessary with the irrelevant and insignificant are underlining to the transition from totalitarianism to democracy.
This video installation was displayed together with Life (and death) under totalitarianism-cum-sultanism in September 2019 in Treforest, Wales.