Urban Warming

A residency works usually on a verified and established diagram. As a starting point you just go and act like an ordinary contemporary artist. First you get familiar to the surroundings: some history, information regarding the social situation and cultural scene, and some basic instructions on how to not get lost in the city. The following days you overwalk all around and take a lots of photos - just shooting anything you find interesting. Therefore, it is quite possible that different artists will, at the beginning, noticing the same things. But to not stuck on same already worn-out issues, you'll have to find a glinch somewhere there through your collected stuff and stick to it. Find additional information, other issues that links to it, conceptualize your story, and work further.
Trying to find paths yet unexplored by the other artists, to construct a personalized subject, to dig to yet undiscovered resources is a task that makes me associate an art residency to the cult soviet book from the 80's titled "Following the footsteps of Robinson" ("Pe urmele lui Robinzon") by Nikolai Verzilin that served as a general guide for one's making himself comfortable in the forest. The main issue that the author centers in his work is to find the natural resources - which he calls "treasures" - that none of the robinsons were able to use, as they were not aware of them or had no enough imagination to figure them out.

Mapping the alternative warming practices in Miskolc links to the social burdens marked by economical load in the cold time period. Strong social interaction and cultural joint are the main things that define urban life. To maintain both active, it is essential to keep the city warm. As gas costs become more and more expensive by each year, the society finds itself forced to look up for alternative methods of fighting the cold. We will look further to identify most notable examples. We'll search for the most skillful firewood greasers and log stokers.
What are the subcultural boiler-houses of Miskolc and who is heating them? Which are the warm areas of the city and what's happening to the places left for freezing out? We draw our hands closer to the stove and start our pursuit.

A chimney on a mean street of Miskolc just starting to smoke. There must be plenty of logs inside...

A LOG LANGUAGE

I was just finished reading the first volume of Tsutomu Nihei's "BIOMEGA" when I was told about Miskolc. Maybe it wasn't fair (I think about it now), or still maybe it was, that I immediately drew a line of similarity between the two. No wonder the landscapes depicted in Nihei's post-apocaliptic manga where the first to sustain the starting information I was given about the hungarian city. That is, it was described to me as being a post-industrial settlement with lots of abandoned factories sharping the nowadays ordinary tendency of the society to build a new life.

"DON'T BE AFRAID!"/"NE FÉLJ" - Lajos CSONTÓ, Miskolc Gallery

Every so often we may lately hear about artists coming in residencies. The research approach they normally attend, working on the formula of showing Chisinau as seen by a filtering eye from aside usually reminds me of the popular zines of the 80's such as Robert Crumb's reports from Bulgaria, or Herluf Bidstrup's graphic brochures about his multiple travellings to the USSR. It might be strange in a way that life in Moldova still has nothing to do but to oblige its guest artists to take the same way of speculating on the soviet-totalitarist remnants of such an exotic country. However, the outcome of these researches are normally well received and sometimes they amaze us by the simple fact they point to such obvious things that we, as locals, could never imagine as being interesting issues to work with in an artistic project.
Thus, if this way the point of a residency in Chisinau is more or less clear then, on the other hand, what could possibly be the reverse? We are always tended to be wondered by the way of how easily (as we think) things work for people educated in the western cultural environment, therefore we get confused when it comes to give some feedback: there are no similar remnants outside there, everything is nice and polished, so how could somebody from around do the same kind of thing there? What could he possibly research for? That is wrong way of thought.
First, stepping over the territorial boundaries of a closed, culturally inactive (as it is called) society is seen as an opportunity of finally contacting some civilization, of getting a seize of Europe. Something like junkie expands his limits enactment.
I think, the thing that defines the young generation of aspiring artists today is fear. There are endless prejudicies and ponderings of right or wrong that block the free action and stressless shift to experiment. If the contemporary art is so insistently being questioned, then what is with this thing that makes artists stay aside of anything links to it just because of the bashful will to avoid being in the middle of a battlespace. Why not maneuvering a bit and operate a personal command? There is no need to join a point of view or another. Question it your own way. Take the challenges and challenge yourself. It is not only about feedback-ing anymore. The situation we've let ourselves to be caught in forces us to feedforward.

Contemporary art is very similar to a log. It is usually perceived as a dumb and always same nonsense look-a-like thing nobody understands... But logs are essential objects to alternative warming in the cold days. Also, logs may sometimes "speak". They may transmit helpful messages to ease our troubles in searching for answers to our worryings and doubts, as seen in the "Twin Peaks". But those messages are not to be understood by anybody. They are meant for those who are able to listen, to seize the meaning behind the strange wordcrafts; to uncode the messages and to transmit them to the right people.

It might be appropriate that contemporary art today needs such a kind of interpreter; a relate status controller that would construe the hard curatorial discourse and link back the broken frequency on which art could stream live and unintricate. There is a need to break the boundaries that limitates art activity to inter-institutional cooperation. Somebody has to speak to the logs.
I chose here to take the identity of a person who is not barely aware of what the answers to all these questions are, to act as an ordinary individual that usually a moldavian is being called - walking around with the face of Gordon Liu entering the 36 shaolin chambers, staring long all the way not getting a clue of what's going on there. I play the role of the stubborn artist that tries to merely understand what contemporary art and what an art residency is all about. Maybe that will serve as a starting point on finding answers to some basic questions. Maybe I only pretend to be playing for that makes it possiblebe to camouflate my incognizance. Maybe that's how I deal with my fear...

*****

The Log Lady:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kINAPtF03RQ&feature=related

Gordon Liu:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmidpQxQEs

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