The project portrays the newly built residential complexes in Romania, constructed in the last 15 years, as objects of desire, as signs of a certain upper social status. It is curious that in the inertia of reinventing itself as a capitalist society, the Romanians ended rejecting all accomplishments of the communist regime, also the good ones. The residential buildings built in the cities of Romania in that period are dismissed unconditionally on the real estate market. The new blocks of flats are embraced, on the other hand, without any reason of a doubt. Their date of construction is the only argument taken seriously into consideration. Their quality, position in the city, access to infrastructure represents secondary criteria in evaluating their value.
This installation is a first work from a longer series based on the documentation of apartment interiors from the new residential complexes of Romania as well as apartments from the old blocks of flats of the 1970-1980 periods, renovated to look as they were new. The work questions the way the interior design of these new hip flats reflects the personality of the owner.
Recipes for interior design were always available, but in the 1970-1980 periods it seemed that with fewer choices of furniture and standard choices of residential architecture, the apartments Romanian lived in were more personalized. They reflected more their education, revenue, hobbies, in comparison with these new spaces the young families live in, that all look alike, they all seem inspired from the same magazines or from the same solutions provided by huge furniture corporations.
In my installation such a standard design solution is presented on a print in the interior of a tent. The tent quotes the improvised shelters homeless people and nomadic people live in, tents that can be found on the outskirts of Romanian cities not far away sometimes from newly built residential complexes. Joining these elements I intend to discuss, not the poverty as a theme, but the desire and the limitations of our desire. We are starting so low that the upper limit of our desire is the offered standard. We start by owning nothing more than the value of a tent, we struggle we make loans without any financial security so in that in the end to choose a standard solution for living, for decorating our homes, standard solutions represent us. We start so low that the uniformity doesn`t bother us anymore, we are content to have at least that.
