Witnessing the Life Unlived, 2017

Approaching the painting medium as a ‘culture of memory’ medium, Lucian Brumă proposes a series of pictural representations which function as instruments of maintaining and consolidating the Holocaust memory. The archive of sufferance, the topography of trauma and the index of witnesses – explored here as artistic methodologies of work – are constituted, as well, as metaphors instrumentated in a medium of remembrance: the painting. In this respect, the works of Lucian Brumă – as witnesses of an unlived life – talk about our recent Romanian anti-Jewish acts, inspired by the European antisemitic ideology, which have expropriated, deported and exterminated thousands of Romanian citizens of Jewish ethnicity.

The memorial paradigm, in which the archaeologies of social life are constituted, is based on the local history which implies a discursive formation of identity – as a consequence of  the experience of trauma –, each individual experience contributing to the complex stratification of the social life, which organicity constitutes the study topic of the social archaeology. In this respect, Lucian Brumă talks about the local trauma of the Pogrom in Iaşi, 1941, where over thirteen thousand Jews were murdered, as an action of ethnical purification, belonging to Antonescu’s political regime, known as “The Cleaning of the Field”.

The life unlived by those peoples – who came to be marginalized culturally, socially, and economically, deprived by identity, propriety, and liberty, deceived by a State which reconsiders its own constitutional obligation referring to the equality of rights for minorities, terrorized, mutilated, locked in freight trains, in which they died of hunger, thirst, and dysentery, deported in Transnistria and Kazakhstan, sent in concentration camps, subjected to humiliations and anti-Semitic atrocities, ending by being massacred and sold, later on, in times of communist regime – subsist through us, and resist as a lesson for humanity.

Exhibition realised in the frame of the curatorial program: Borderline Art Space – contextual archaeologies of the social life. Organizer: Asociația AltIași. Project financially supported by Administrația Fondului Cultural Național (the Administration of National Cultural Fund in Romania). Sponsor: Gramma Winery. Media partner: WINK.

curator, Cristina Moraru