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8/10/2014

Enchanting Views

MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

Curatori: Kalliopi Dimou, Sorin Istudor, Alina Serban

Enchanting Views is the first exhibition devoted to one of the most coherent and innovative projects of post-war modernity in Romanian architecture, namely, the tourist development of the Black Sea coastline during the 1960s and 1970s.
While the exhibition do not pretend to have an exhaustive view on the Romanian coastline planning strategies, it has attempted to put together a display able to capture the role played by this vast architectural endeavor and development in articulating a new vision of socialist modernity, directly reflecting on the implicit representations that leisure architecture projected in the visual and social space of the period.

Enchanting Views proposes a new reading of the visual and symbolic identity of the Romanian Black Sea coastline, placing architecture at the center of a time-specific visual culture, essential both to understanding the local tourism policies and the experience of modernity. Thus, the exhibition expands its research framework from the politics of space to the politics of image, revisiting some of the most important works of this architectural laboratory between 1957 and 1973.

Tracing the mise-en-scène effect of leisure architecture, a sensitive framework for the interaction between the discourse of the developer (the state), of the architect and of the user (the tourist), the exhibition records the manner in which the leisure program is integrated to the official mechanism of promoting the successful narratives of socialism. The “new objectivity,” reasserted by the architectural discourse, is accompanied, in the plane of visual representation, by the seductive language of formal expressions, by the clarity and expressiveness of design. Thus, leisure architecture as an autonomous visual territory manages to redefine the conventions of reading the ideas of modernity locally, without restricting them to a set of procedures and technologies, restoring the theme of the architect-author through the varied range of typologies and the aestheticism of the building solutions.

The experience of the coastline is an important episode of Romanian post-war modernity which needs to be analyzed in the context of the organized mode of spending the leisure time, of the rationalization of consumption and of the particular conditions of mobility of the tourist. Beyond the intricate interdependence between the ideological concerns, the state development policies and the architectural practices, the project underlines the integration of the leisure architecture program in Romania in a trans-national discourse, examining the dissemination of the concepts and principles of Western modernism in the socialist economy and reality and the particular manner of enforcement thereof.
The exploration of the seductive expressions of seaside architecture and the impact of mass tourism on society start from a careful reading of the socialist microcosm, describing the varied practices of representation of leisure architecture (as a collective recreational space and a setting of socialist utopia), the economic pragmatism (the tourist policies of the 1960s and 1970s, the interest for technologization and industrialization).

The design of the Dalles Hall display is conceived in the form of exhibition satellites which contain the archive photographs, a selection of case studies – architectural typologies and plans associated with a series of references circulated between both sides of the Iron Curtain, interviews, propaganda movies, and works by artists Ion Grigorescu and Nicu Ilfoveanu.

Project organized by the pepluspatru Association.
The exhibition, as well as the publication and the accompanying seminar have been produced with the support of the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, ERSTE Foundation, the Chamber of Architects in Romania, the Romanian Cultural Institute, The Dobrogea local subsidiary of the Chamber of Architects, The Union of Romanian Architects – Arhitectura Magazine image archive, Atlas Corporation, Printman SRL, Square Media, Crama Corvoca.
Cultural project financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

Media partners: Agerpres, Zeppelin, Arhitext, Igloo, arhiforum.ro, feeder.ro, Sapte Seri, Radio France Internationale

Related event
Tuesday, 4 November, 5:00 pm
Seminar: Situating Modernity in the Black Sea Region. Trans-cultural Encounters, Ambivalent Maps and Leisure Architecture.
The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Izvor Street, no. 2–4, Bucharest

Image Courtesy: Agerpres, photo: Petre Dumitrescu, Olimp, 1973

Opening: Thursday, 9 October, 7:00 pm

Dalles Hall, National Museum of Contemporary Art
18, Nicolae Bălcescu Avenue, 1st District, Bucharest
Hours: Wednesday – Sunday 10 am – 6 pm
Free entrance

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