What’s left

What’s left

A performative dinner

prepared by Elia Nurvista, Wimo Ambala Bayang, Adelina Luft

27.6.2018

at 9, Nicolae Balcescu bld., sixth floor

The residency in Bucharest has catapulted the residents from Indonesia into an unaltered apartment from the 70s decorated in a paradoxical crowded blend of bourgeois style, orthodox shrines, and a familiar socialist touch, for almost a month. Like in a cabinet of curiosities, the residents immersed in the house’s configuration, turning it into a headquarter for research and studio site.

The artists decided to use the house not just as a space for living and researching, but also as the site for the final presentation. This occurs in the spirit of the alternative artistic manifestation from ’87, house pARTy in Bucharest, as a way for the artists to personally experience and engage with this type of manifestation, although in a different context and with different aims. Starting from the variations on the notion and consequences of food limitation in Romania prior to 89, the performative dinner gathers people we have encountered and who have informed the background of the works at an intimate dinner table.

Elia’s artistic practice on the discourse of food as a means to scrutinize power, politics and economic inequalities in the world is taken further in the frame of our current research. Drawing on the specters of a socialist past, the dinner will invite participants to discuss and share views to collectively build common real and imagined historical narratives on the Romania-Indonesia axis. Wimo Ambala will respond to the chaotic blend of the in site artefacts with videos and photographs where the in situ becomes both the subject and object of research. The house intervention by Wimo will be also used as a platform for collecting voices to further create a video work in collaboration with poet Vasile Leac.

All photos by Petre Fall.