My project started with a box inherited from my paternal grandparents, with photos from 100 years ago - a box that was waiting for me in a drawer for decades and was inspired by the Nar Rated Archives (Archive PoVestite ), the project of Cristina Irian.
As I knew almost nothing about the people in the photos, I had to research. The fruits of my documentary were two family trees and a family monograph. The online thing I had to decide was how I would approach the project. At first, I chose to break down and reassemble that archive, like in a game, I chose to reinterpret them in an artistic project and the experience itself was magic – no exaggeration! But it did not remain a simple art project and I owe this to Iulia Pana, who told me about Cristina's project.
What I have in that box is a circulated postcard photo, front and back, as seen in the album. This type of photography is not intended for media exposure, precisely because of its personal/intimate character, but at the same time, it has cultural and historical relevance. At the same time, it is the type of photography that has become interesting during this time. But did I have the right to make them public? Thus began a silent dialogue with the ancestors I have never met, a dialogue that marked me forever. Under Tristan Tzara's motto, Art needs an operation, I was starting a journey with my ancestors that - later I realized - mattered more than the destination.
How should we enter the images? In privacy when they did not agree to such exposure. Of course, everything is done with extreme affection. Maybe a kind of cruelty. Tzara is the master of cruelty. He made "Le fruit interdit" "le fruit permis" - Marlena Braester wrote to me.
I often think that the passion awakened by these old pictures is just a counter-movement of the present to the millions of photos that invade the virtual. How many of us don't take photos that we post without ever looking at them again!? I found myself looking with different eyes at the photos taken in photo studios in Romania in the years 1910-1930 when a portrait became a celebration and an unforgettable moment.
There followed the period in which I created for the first time images from the Fine Art Collage category, years in which I studied the artistic currents of a hundred years ago, years in which I went through a whole range of emotions - starting from doubt and disappointment and reaching to joy and ecstasy, years in which I was one step away from abandoning the project. Caught in a temporal vortex, under the signs of homage to my ancestors, I created an imaginary world, I configured scenarios by destructuring and reassembling, sometimes using my own photographs, but which do not lack allusions to the artistic currents of the time (Cubism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism).
The end of 2022 was at the Museum of Art in Constanta with the exhibition IMAGINARY - My Ancestors and the release of the album with the same title, a mission made possible thanks to Iulia Pană, a curator of the exhibition and the editor of the album.
An amazing album in which we get to know the UNKNOWN - in the mathematical sense of the word, with some ABSENCES passed through the imagination full of artistic vibrations of the author: the once real past metamorphosed into an unreal present. Marlena Braester
I invite you to follow Sabina de Rochefort's exhortation "Open the book - touch the Imaginary!".
The album can be browsed here: https://magdafulger.com/books