Archives of the contruction complex Danube-Black Sea Canal

                                         The archive appears in the space opened up by the outstretched arm of a power. A power - a Gewalt - wants to seize, to fix, to order with a view to something. Or not a power, but the power itself wants this: die Macht, patriarch, state, capital. Above all, let's not forget that there must be the ability, the willingness to dispose of the materials and processes that make up the archive in order to have an archive.   

                                             The gesture of grasping is perhaps the most intimately related to the uses of the archive which always remain hidden, mixed, confunded with the materiality of history. Only in retrospect does the archive look like a pile of data, like file shelves. The temptation of artistic research to plastically reconstruct the past by "freely" or "creatively" using the archive, in other words the temptation to remake the "picture" of a past world in order to be understood or "felt" better in the present, conceals precisely that primary grasping gesture whose late and distorted echo is the artistic gesture.

     Since power speaks to itself, always in its own language, in the archive, we need to develop a fine hearing even before we see it, otherwise we will not be able to hear the trumpets with which power celebrates and honors itself, nor will we be able to decipher the cunning with which it disguises its actions and intentions. Images – like raw facts, figures, statistics – are the first to deceive. It is so easy for us today to recognize in the archival documents from the Construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal the oppressive force of the Ceaușescu regime, to see behind the appearances the "communist lie", to point the finger at the obscenity with which the party staged its achievements. But can we just as well notice the words that capital whispers in our ears urging us to accept, as something inevitable and self-evident, the subordination of infrastructure to the prerogatives of profit or the militarization of infrastructure? With their mute, opaque presence, the materials in this archive point to the possibility that these two seemingly different viewpoints belong to a single, intolerable and undemocratic perspective.