Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

Social Text, July 2013

Decolonial AestheSis in Eastern Europe: Potential Paths of Liberation

The postcommunist transition has been characterized in Eastern Europe by the return and
rearticulation of capitalism and coloniality in this region of the world. Seen from Eastern
Europe, the postcommunist transition can be understood as the top-to-bottom integration of
East European governmentalities into the political (EU), security (NATO, FRONTEX) and
economic orders (IMF, WB) of Western governmentalities, at the cost of the general
population, and with the open support of the Eurocentric intellectuality and formal civil
society, including most of the former anticommunist dissidents. In so far as Romania is
concerned, the depression of the late 1980s has been followed without any period of recovery
by the catastrophic depression of the 1990s, when poverty and social insecurity have reached
levels unheard of since World War Two.1 After a brief period of growth in the early 2000s,
with the onset of the crisis of global capitalism, Eastern Europe was confronted with the third
depression in three decades – and maybe the least dramatic one. However, the eruption of the
crisis within the Western world and the rise of the Global South has dramatically eroded since
2008 the ideological power of postcommunist foundational narratives. In the past three years,
a wave of popular movements has risen throughout the former socialist bloc, at a scale
unprecedented since 1989, leading among other things to the demise of the neoliberal
governments in Romania and Bulgaria. In other words, the post-1989 civilizational promise of
Europe and Occidentalism has currently reached a critical point of saturation in Eastern
Europe. However, the direction taken by the accompanying disenchantment and reinvention is
by no means predetermined.2 Consequently, one is faced today with the historical task of
decolonizing the imaginary and rebuilding alliances, against the dissemination of cynicism,
ethnocentric nationalism, and postcommunist racism.

Before the “objective event” of the global capitalist crisis, the besieged life of
postcommunism has arguably allowed the germination of critical imagination and innovative
theoretical practices in contemporary arts and philosophy more than in social sciences. To
give just a few points of flight, the much-anticipated end of the transition received a
humorous iconic visualization in Ciprian Mureşan’s Leap into the Void, After Three Seconds
(2004),3 while Daniel Knorr’s European Influenza, the empty pavilion of Romania at the 51st
Venice Biennale (2005),4 conceived as a “powerful countermodel to the eastern expansion of
the European Union”, proved the aggressive resonant power of the named void. Around the
same time, Moldovan playright Nicoleta Esinencu published her piece FUCK YOU Eu.ro.Pa
(2005), a monologue-letter addressed by a young woman to her father, a powerful rejection of
both nationalism and Europeanization. The work was received with indignant cries in the
mainstream Romanian public sphere. Mona and Florin Vătămanu’s photo series Obor Cocor.
Natural Resistance (2006) then proposed seeing the value of resistance of local urban
surroundings that had previously been viewed as damned or hopeless.5 Related theoretical

1
According to the conservative measurements by the World Bank, poverty rose from an estimated 6% of the
population during 1987-1988 to an estimated 39% during 1993-1995. World Bank reports on Romania from
1995-1996, retrieved at 05.01.2013 from www-wds.worldbank.org.
2
On the different options in a polycentric world order, see Walter Mignolo, “The Roads to the Future.
Rewesternization, Dewesternization, and Decoloniality”, in The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global
Futures, Decolonial Options, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2011, 27-74.
3
See http://artnews.org/cacgeneva/?exi=33023
4
The exhibition left the national pavilion empty, “showing” only the traces of past exhibitions and the words
“European Influenza”. See http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/robinson/robinson6-20-1.asp
5
See www.monavatamanuflorintudor.ro/oborcocor.htm.
preoccupations lead to a positive epistemic interest in decoloniality, and the publication of the
“Decolonial Aesthetics Manifesto” in IDEA arts + society #39/2011,6 was followed by a
theoretical appeal for the decolonization of Eastern Europe and the need to reimagine Europe
“from East-South” (Bogdan Ghiu),7 launched with the occasion of the 2011 Venice Biennial.
Such forms of criticality, whether in iconic form or through philosophical imagination, have
been accompanied by a different body of work, which brought to visibility positive forms of
resistance, while also documenting and analyzing dominant historical phenomena such as
anticommunism, nationalism, immigration, border politics, generalized precarity, and the
burden of transition upon women. These directions of research show the political potential of
a decolonial aestheSis of liberation in Eastern Europe: not as much in the sense of the
development of a new chapter of artistic virtuosity or new perspectival objectivity, to which
one could attach a new aesthetical theory (and with it new principles of appreciation,
collection and commodification), as a call to the whole world: the manifestation of an active
way of perception, transnational yet embodied and localized, able to confront and re-orient the
present by seeing or sensing the reality of past historical changes, and ready to propose other
options based on the power of resurgence dwelling in certain everyday-life experiences.
Thus, the film Red Tours (2010), by Joanne Richardson and David Rych takes a tour of the
museums and statue parks of communism in the former Socialist Bloc, showing how these
institutions are doing their part in the work of self-colonization, by instituting a normative
history which asks people to take an absolute distance from their own past, while
simultaneously adopting a modernist civilizational or simply the consumerist standpoint from
an eternal ahistorical present. What emerges is that anticommunism was instrumentalized as
the regional articulation of the coloniality of power in the former socialist bloc.8 Rather than
working for social justice after totalitarianism, the establishment of anticommunism has
instituted an insidious repression and even fabrication of people’s relation to their own
historical experience. In the history of transition, the establishment of anticommunism cannot
be separated from the process of selecting the new postcommunist elites and the new model
subject, by way of adopting and articulating the social hierarchies of the colonial matrix of
power in the local public spheres. In Eastern Europe, one can often trace a straight path from
anticommunism to Westernization. Consequently, since the trope of communism refers in
Eastern Europe to a real historical experience, one can either engage in the resistant yet
modernist project of developing a “purer” doctrine of communism, or search for possible
avenues of liberation in the alternative epistemologies and non-capitalist economies that
already proliferated in the everyday-life of real socialism, beneath the official ideology.

Joanne Richardson’s Letter from Moldova (2009)9 shifts the discussion on postcommunist
nationalism onto the terrain of a border epistemology, showing with clarity that nationalism
actually operates an erasure of history from the everyday life, which is particularly troubling
during a time of paradigmatic changes. The filmmaker’s failed history of actually crossing the
borders to the East of the East is compensated in the film with ready-made images of the East
beyond borders, found in abundance on the internet. The resulting disembodied perspective
can be correlated both with the disappearance of Eastern Europe after 1989, called by Marina
Gržnici the “former Eastern Europe”10 and with Manuela Boatcă’s observation that

6
Miguel Rojas-Sotelo and Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet, on behalf of the group on Decolonial Aesthetics,
“Decolonial Aesthetics: Collective Creative Practice in Progress. See http://idea.ro/revista/pdf/idea39.pdf
7
See “The Next East for a New World: Rethinking Peripheral European Modernities in Decolonial Perspective”,
in Performing History, Publication of the Romanian Pavillion at the 54th Venice Biennial, pp.94-104.
8
For the concept of “coloniality of power” see Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin
America”, Nepantla: Views From the South 1(3), 2000: pp. 533-580.
9
See http://vimeo.com/39061067.
10
Marina Gržnic, Communication in the workshop Critical and Decolonial Dialogues Across South-North and
East West, Middelburg, The Netherlands, 7-9 July 2010.
“Easternness, in its European variant”, is traditionally seen as a place “continually passed
on”.11 Or, in Joanne Richardson’s own words: “These are images of a place where I have
never been. For all I know, it may not even exist”. The produced non-existence of Eastern
Europe is thus correlative with a recent abundance of images about it, which are defining a
particular repertoire and regime of visibility.12 If the global sense of “Europe” owed much to
transformation of the “former East” into the image of a fictive past of Europe itself, then
today is highly important to shift the perspective from a state of alochronic projection to a
self-standing location of knowledge with its own sense of time, as in Pavel Brăila’s film
Chişinău, a City Difficult to Pronounce (2011), which follows the life of the city throughout
one year.13 The film does not propose a description of the city in terms of landscape and
sightseeing, or discursive narration, but a visual and visceral naming of the city through
loaded experiences, actions, and intimations, such as travelling the bus in the morning, the
cleaning of public places even earlier in the morning, the serving window of a remaining
public canteen at lunch time, the industrial interior of the bread factory that covers and unifies
the whole city, the work of the factory that multiplies that ubiquitous object of Moldovan
rural and urban life, the very colorful plastic basins, and, of course, the warmth-suggesting
outside-drying habits within the interior courtyards of the famous neighborhoods of grey
concrete.
Another direction of research has been started by Tranzit.ro curator and IDEA colleague
Raluca Voinea: by investigating the presence of the Falanster of Scăieni from the early 1830s
in the memory of local people, academics and artists willing to take it as a point of departure,
they opened a “Pandora’s box” of localized cultural memory of many similar regional
locations, against the tremendous power of destroying local history manifested by the
coloniality of the postcommunist transition. Beyond the confines of contemporary art, the
explosion of sign, graffiti and stencil creativity in Romanian cities after the popular revolts of
2012 showed already the power of creating a community and consecrating places of
“perpetual political re-invention” like Piaţa Universităţii from Bucharest,14 through artistic
practices that name and give epistemic dignity to one’s own historical experience, without
reverting to ethnocentric nationalism.15

The videos of the collection Young, Female, Precarious (2008), by the collectives D-Media,
Candida TV and Ak-kraak laid the foundations of a feminist critique of precarity,16 while the
art collective H.ARTA’s has engaged in a decade-long revival of feminist imagination and
feminist collective practice, beyond the hegemonic liberal model.17 Here is how the members
of H.ARTA collective described their own work: “What is most important for us in our
practice is to constantly question our position as artists, as citizens, as women based in a
country that used to be part of the former „East“, as “white” women living what is now a
„European“ country… this work of continually examining one’s own role and position cannot
be done outside collective practices, outside collaborative work and inter-disciplinary

11
Manuela Boatcă, “No Race to the Swift. Negotiating Racial Identity in Past and Present Eastern Europe”,
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, V, 1, Fall 2006, 92.
12
On the finite visual repertoire of post-1989 Western televised discurses about Eastern Europe, see Andaluna
Borcilă, “The Televisual Debut of Postcommunism”, in Konrad Petrovszky, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, Romanian
Revolution Televised. Contributions to the Cultural History of Media, Cluj, IDEA Design & Print, pp.199-210.
13
See Pavel Brăila’s “Chişinău, a City Difficult to Pronounce” (2011), IDEA arts + society #38, 2011.
14
See Bogdan Ghiu, Raluca Voinea, “Piaţa Universităţii”, IDEA arts + society, #42, 2013, forthcoming.
15
On the political phenomenon of graffiti as socially creative, see Gabriel Soldatenko, “The Politics of Writing
on Walls”, Rhizomes, #25 (2013). See http://www.rhizomes.net/issue25/soldatenko.html
16
Young, Female, Precarious brings together 5 videos about gender and precarious labour produced between
2006-2008 by D Media (Romania), Candida TV (Italy), and Ak-Kraak (Germany).
17
H.ARTA, Feminisme. Recapituland concepte si afirmand noi pozitii/ FEMINISMS. Reviewing concepts and
affirming new positions, Timisoara, 2010. See www.hartagroup.ro.
practice, trying to create models for work that bring theory as close as possible to practice and
that also encourage debate and continually attempt to correct the inherent hierarchies that are
created inside groups. We consider art to be a good method of making this sort of analysis
possible, of creating the situations for meaningful encounters and discussions.”18 The personal
and experiential positioning enables the members of H.ARTA to reach the point where it is
possible to see and ask questions such as: “Which are the differences and similarities between
the “state feminism“ of the communism era and the new “European“ gender mainstreaming?
How should we relate to the post-communist silence regarding feminism and the role of
women in the communist period, to the necessity of an objective analysis of them? How could
one use the feminist strategies and perspectives as a way of analyzing the privileges and
power relations which global capitalism is structured on? What relation does occur between
patriarchate and capitalism? How could one talk about feminism and gender-related issues
avoiding copying a “Western paradigm“ and, at the same time, talk about local problems
without imprinting exoticism onto oneself?”19 The questions asked by East European
feminism bring to visibility another history of silencing and different points of struggle,
resistance and liberation. One such perspective, developed by Biroul de Cercetări
Melodramatice, takes a generalist approach, talking about the “spectres of fetuses” haunting
the post-communist imagination, up to and including the idea of “aborted Romania.”20 But
when and where does one see and experience the intimate intersections of gender, race and
coloniality in Eastern Europe?

East Europeans learned after 1989 to put on their European masks, and re-inventing the
process of conscientization is anything but easy or predictable. Decolonizing the imaginary
requires small but heroic acts which amount to nothing less than epistemic revolutions. In a
way, it means bringing “tickets to another planet”, as Adel Idris put it recently, in the short
reflection of his immigrant experience in Germany, Asylum Hotel (2012).21 In another
formulation, it means materially bridging the sense of another world, beyond
modernity/coloniality, based on concrete historical experiences and alternative knowledges.
Decolonial aesthetics try to overcome the internal criticism of modernity, but this path of
liberation, as James Brown warned, is a messy, “funky” affair. It is not “new” in the clean
formalist sense of an abstract New: the weapons of decolonial thought and imagination are
growing from memories and experiences of repression, resistance and liberation.
The regretted Romanian artist Ioana Nemeş succeeded in creating just such an opening, ripe
with that messy mixture of felt embodiment and intimate alienation of any experience of
racialization, by way of a standpoint reversal of identity: in a contemporary art event
dedicated to the motive of children, she chose to tell the story of a blond boy-owner from the
perspective of his grey rabbit-toy. Not unlike the story of the Western world rediscovering in
the 1990s its own “maturity” through a telescope looking at the “infant postcommunist
democracies”, this is the story of a metamorphosis, capturing nothing less than the transition
of the blond boy from childhood to maturity. However, within this established standpoint, the
story takes an internal twist, becoming through the act of storytelling the story of the rabbit-
toy itself, who is the one performing the narrative voice. From this other subjective
standpoint, a third-space seemingly outside gender, race and class, we get a sensible
description of the intricate processes of racializing, loving and owning in postcommunist

18
Kontekst and h.arta, “Without borders? Some critical reflections on European and global border conditions”,
Belgrade, Kontekst Gallery, Magacin Gallery, 2009. See workshopwithoutborders.wordpress.com/
19
Raluca Voinea, “Art As Methodology. Interview with H.arta Group about the Project Feminisms,Timiøoara,
September 2008 – May 2009”, IDEA arts + society, #30–31, 2008.
20
Biroul de Cercetări Melodramatice, “Romania’s Pain Memorials, Biological Pathos and the Spectres of
Fetuses”, 2012. See: http://thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.com/
21
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBi-ULP2oFM
Eastern Europe. Thus, we learn that the rabbit-toy hates his own name (Balthazar), that it has
been manufactured in a toy factory from the city of Arad, Romania, after the photographed
image of a Viennese model rabbit. Namely, the grey rabbit-toy appeared thanks to the
mediation of a black-and-white photography of a real blue rabbit. And thus we get to share
what the grey rabbit feels: “Those who have designed me, filled me with synthetic wool and
sew me had all-along the process a black-and-white photograph of an excellent representative
of the blue Vienna rabbit in front. I have only seen it once, very briefly, before the accessories
workshop master attached my last labels – actual tomes, explaining my superior origins, the
textiles used at my assemblage and all those boring details of EU protection norms. The rabbit
in the photograph stood with a serene air, aware of his assets… I had only spotted him for a
second or so yet I’ll never forget the content expression of his face… I cannot find words to
convey the significance that rabbit bears in my eyes… I couldn’t say he was my ancestor, as a
matter of fact there is no link between us, but still, I am made in his image and likeness. This
almost verges on religion, only my ancestor is mortal to the bone. And ephemeral. And
perfect, I would say. I met his soft, noble eyes, and then darkness descended upon me. I saw
nothing except for the cardboard box into which they were trying to squeeze me. These
packaging things can be quite uncomfortable.”22 What happens next, as the blond boy decides
one day to categorize and package his toys in boxes labeled “Past”, “Present”, and “Future,”
is really a matter of opened imagination. Suffices to say that for this East European sensibility
the future is never there, but nor is the present.
Here, by shifting the way of ideas to the sense of the grey rabbit and to the local sensing of the
grey neighborhoods of concrete, we are only glimpsing the immense liberating potential of a
decolonial aestheSis, linking the experience of racialization of East Europeans with the radical
transformations suffered by Eastern Europe in recent history. Before 1989, the difference
between East and West Europe was one between radically different epistemologies. After
1989, the only difference between East and West Europe is a mode of colonial difference. Yet
the resistance against coloniality and capitalism is growing. In a time of global historical
changes, one cannot emphasize enough the importance of valuing the wide range of such re-
creational practices, the gathering of non-modernist voices, senses and sensibilities into an
alternative epistemic and political horizon.

22
Ioana Nemeş, Balthazar, International Biennial of Contemporary Arts, Iaşi, Romania, 2006.