images | text

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
Born in 1968  in Constanta, Romania; born in 1974 in Geneva, Switzerland / Lives in Bucharest, Romania;  lives in Berlin, Germany

Adriano Pedrosa (AP): What are the origins and references of Land Distribution (2010)?

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor (MV & FT): Land and land distribution mean currency, reform, or poverty, depending on geographical, historical, or sociopolitical conditions. Nowadays in Venezuela the land is redistributed to poorer people in order to give them a chance to start their own small, self-sufficient farms. They use analog VHS tape to fence the land and create smaller, random units meant to host families. On the other hand, we witnessed how collective property dissolved in the 1990s in Eastern Europe; it was the end of the socialist reforms related to the idea of sharing things. The brutal reformists of the 1950s were replaced again in the 1990s by banks and private corporations waiting patiently for people to take out loans and to pledge with their land for this. But in Venezuela the use of VHS tape in the redistribution put this obsolete technology in a new light. This time it is not a medium bearing the image of the other (in the 1980s VHS tapes were the most common way the West was seen in the East) but a way to project the future.

AP: You seem to be repoliticizing geometric abstraction, as well as allowing people to enter and interact with the work, something that calls to mind Brazilian Neoconcretismo.

MV & FT: We try to construct situations that reflect on reality. Sometimes these involve people interacting with an environment, and other times geometry, which maybe reminds you of Neoconcretismo. The decision to construct a grid that contradicts the initial action of people fencing land in an informal way talks about and questions possibilities. The contradiction between the reality of a utopian program meant to expand and transform the world and the desires of people living in that world drives us as a communityOne way to picture this is to think about the problematic relation (love and hate) of people with modernist, radical Brutalist architecture.

AP: Your paintings of political demonstrations bring highly charged political content to the realm of the aesthetic, this time through very fine pictorial and painterly work.

MV & FT: Like in the case of the installations or other interventions, there is some kind of underlying narration that functions for us subjectively as a connection with reality. We decided to use painting as political tool to represent a struggle that is going on—to use aesthetics as a medium to represent the ones that put in discussion the structure that surrounds us.

AP: How does your collaboration work?

MV & FT: Usually our method of working on projects is through discussions, sometimes contradictory discussions. In the end, the material form of the work comes from, and is subordinate to, the idea.