Dan Acostioaei 

Seas under Deserts

video installation; HD, color, sound, 9’53”, 2016–2017

© Dan Acostioaei

Employing a multi-layered narrative that superposes personal memories and geopolitical analysis, the photographic and video installation Mări sub pustiuri (Seas under Deserts) proposes an articulation of an affective knowledge in relation to the socialist legacy. The personal and political ties intertwine against a dense cultural and ideological background that combines multiple temporalities. The starting point for the work consists of documents, images and material traces left by my father during his dispatch as a construction engineer in Syria from 1975 to 1978 and in Iraq from 1981 to 1983. At the same time this artwork explores the socialist trade with countries from the Middle East during the time of Ceaușescu’s regime analyzed as an alternative to current East-West relations. The images both implicitly evoke and stand in contrast to the migration of labor to the West after 1989 and the recent wave of Syrian refugees seeking asylum in Europe.

The viewer is invited to reconstruct a possible political and personal narrative from the fragments at hand, comprised largely of personal histories, communicational exchanges, maps, tourist snapshots and impersonal photographic materials like postcards and similar.

The film that accompanies the installation begins with an excerpt from Dumitru Radu Popescu’s short story “Mări sub pustiuri” (Seas under Deserts):

“He would try in vain to explain to her that the Sahara was a region that had been just temporarily deserted by humans, that no wasteland is real, that water exists everywhere on earth, like life, and that nobody can make it run dry. The Sahara had been devastated at some point, for some unknown reason, and had remained desolate. But the water was there, and he had even read somewhere that there were huge seas under the deserts. It’s just that man needs to move them, to get this treasure up to the surface…”