The Rain /Ploaia 

film 3'42", USF Bergen, 2005

series of drawings
"It is a poetic picture, one charged with allegories, resonances, and comparisons. The metaphor is full of symbolism: it's pouring rain. A man is sitting holding a sketchpad, trying to draw a simple, minimalist, serial structure, but the rain keeps washing the sheet clean. Ploaia [The Rain] is the name of the short film by Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor. Among other things, is about the impossibility of reconstructing reality. But it is more. A game with many encoded displacements, not merely decoration. What Tudor, the man in the film, is trying to capture here on this negative mystic writing pad is the memory of the place where he grew up, Bucharest. More precisely, of those monotonous serial apartment houses with which dictator Nicolae Ceausescu transformed and bricked over the cityscape in the late 70s, gradually and radically obliterating the old Bucharest. But memory reduces the house to a model; the reconstruction seems abstract. Tudor's drawing becomes the trace left behind by an engram of modernism that cannot be pinpointed and yet has congealed into form an infinite number of times: the register, the matrix, the grid, the minimalist repetition of the box. What the man in the film does not succeed at the film does manage, on a different level-it quotes the memory of the same era. It is a remake of Marcel Broothaers's 1969 film La Pluie: history, impossible memory, traumatic reconstruction work, a universal form and a media quotation."
excerpt from The Masters of the New Cities by Georg Schollhammer, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009.


"The Bergen Project started off as an effort to remember the architecture created in Bucharest between the two World Wars, a layer in the history of the city which is slowly turning to ruin. We were trying to make a systematic inventory of those buildings, from memory. We went in circles for over a week, unable to finalize the gesture. It felt like a combination of pathos and nostalgia and we eventually realized we were actually dealing with trauma - so we progressively switched to the idea of drawing communist blocks. The residency in Bergen also meant for us an important change of context, it was a memory void that allowed us to project differently, from an affective standpoint, those places and blocks. From the somewhat absurd initial idea of drawing from memory and from this change of context appears the solution of the Broodthaers quote. Memory or its breakdown is an interpretative key, alongside the vulnerability of personal history: the film is to a certain extent a consequence of the effort of remembering deployed in previous projects."
Interview with Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor by Mihnea Mircan
IDEA #20, 2005
exhibition view, Atlas of Modernity. The 20th and 21th Century Art Collection, ms Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz, since january 2014






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