Single Man Looking

Single Man Looking
Adrian Schiop
20.1.2015 – 10.4.2015

After my second novel was published I abandoned the social scene in the center of the city and I dedicated myself to the study of manele and to the Ferentari neighbourhood ghetto culture, where I had relocated the year before. From there, it didn’t seem that Ferentari, with its destitute poor and junkies, is the ghetto, but the Center, a closed community of artists and creative types, like a reservation of individuals free from any obligations and responsibilities, such as children and mortgage payments.

Long story short, I was trying to go back to my roots as an upstart peasant, to be a cocalar wannabe. But it didn’t work out. I was still an alien in the world of Ferentari. In my last novel I attempted to analyse this failure – why people saw me as as a weirdo and a freak to the end. I don’t know if I solved that puzzle by writing, but I realised something else – that in Ferentari I was a representative of the reservation of creative types from the Center – I have no children or mortgage and my staying in Ferentari was possible only because I had the safety net of a doctoral scholarship which allowed me an easy carefree life.

What I want to do as writer in residence at ODD is to dig deeper into my schizoid identity as a member of the world of the Center, where I don’t feel I belong, and a wannabe denizen of Ferentari, where I can’t really fit in. It’s interesting and sad at the same time to be amongst ‘real people’ of the working class, but the cost of such a life is a certain exclusion and obtuseness which, especially to a gay person, are of no help, but on the contrary, they bring even more alienation.

Therefore, considering that ODD is an art space in the Center of the city which will host me over a two and a half month period, I want to explore the Bucharest contemporary art world, with its characters, events, ideologies and gossip. Will it be for me, will it capture my imagination, after four years of living at the periphery? Hence, the title of my project, Single Man Looking, referring to the time spent at the gallery as a transition from something I thought was clear to me to something else, which is not clear yet, and to my loneliness and perpetual search for something – a person, a place, a purpose – at over 40.

As part of my residency I am proposing a program consisting of regular blog entries about the art world, its events and personae, a series of free of charge workshops on creative writing and a closing event, a concept party or something else entirely, to be announced in due time.

Media partners for this project