Praful / The Dust
film, performance, 6'08", 2006, Schitul Maicilor, Bucuresti

views from the exhibition Suplus Value, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst Utrecht, 2009

In 1982, the monastery Schitul Maicilor was demolished and the small church translated 200m to make way for the new communist civic center and the house of the people. 24 years after we went there and filled our pockets with dust from the actual location of the church and took the dust back to its original location. "... Praful [The Dust] (2006) shows Tudor, filmed by Vatamanu, gathering and transporting dust from the location of a chapel that had been moved several hundred meters from the Schitul Maicilor monastery, which was razed in 1982 to clear the site for the construction of a communist civic center. After filling his trouser pockets Tudor, bathed in the golden light of early morning (or late afternoon), walks along the roadside from the church to a grassy slope, the original location of the chapel, over which the impressive official architecture of Ceausescu's former House of the People, or People's House, looms. He looks up toward the adjacent Romanian Academy building while emptying his pockets of their large quantity of conserved dust and the film ends. The tragicomic absurdity of these performances is metaphorical of the cruel folly behind the enforced upheaval entailed in replacing one ideological emblem of collective life with another." excerpt from Mapping the History of the Present by Vivian Rehberg, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, monographic publication published by BAK and Post Editions, 2009. index