S.A.B.A. (Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu)
Metropia
Curator: Cătălin Gheorghe
Aparte Project Space, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, Iași, January 2014
A project produced by Vector Studio in partnership with UNAGE as part of Carte Blanche aux Jeunes Créateurs programme financially supported by Institut Français in Iaşi.
Curatorial argument:
An observational and meditative examination of the feeling of the city’s presence involves experiencing the tension between the promise of a utopia of equality in coexistence rights and the political failure of the fair sharing of the social functions of inhabiting the urban space.
The city has become divided into a multitude of urban concepts and remnants of intersections and dispersals of the concrete life of the inhabitants, who were deliberately exiled outside the sphere of the concepts of geo-cultural territorialization. Thus, for example, the concept of “creative city” has created the project of trans-substantiating the lives of certain inhabitants in relation to the failed project of improving the quality of life in working-class neighbourhoods or “slums”. The “creative city” is established based on “innovative standards” that emphasize inaccessibility and privilege. In political theory, through a rigorously financially supported populist process, the “creative city” would hyper-realize itself, rising above the indistinct metropolis, becoming monumental, insular or perhaps even galactic, floating attached from strings tensioned to the maximum.
The artistic research of Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu has sketched the premises of a visual archaeology on the status of distinctions established within a possible urban anthropology in which street people are put in the situation of creating primary architectures of survival, while “creative people” are put to work for the “new causes” of metropolitan development in complex architectures of prosperity.
SABA – Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu (b. 1991, Iași and Timișoara) is an artist couple working together since 2012. Their artistic practice could be positioned at the border between social studies and visual arts, researching for methods and examples where art and artistic means can be instrumentalised in order to overexcite the ability to look beyond capitalism and create a (common) future. Among their recent solo shows are “s.a.b.a 1979-####” (2020, Ljubljana, SI), “It was always in plain sight” (2020, Bucharest, RO), “If Then What After” (2019, Baden, AT), “What Past? What Future?” (2017, Linz, AT), “Depression, Uncertainty and other Symptoms of Mortality” (2016, Lodz, Poland), while their works have been presented in many group exhibitions such as “Rewriting Our Imaginations” (2020, Basel, CH), “Go, Stop, Stay” (2019, Debrecen, HU), “STRIKE GENTLY AWAY ____” (2019, Salzburg, AT), “Displacement and Togetherness” (2019, Brussels, BE), “Capital’s Time Machine” (2018, Bucharest, RO), “Baywatch” (2018, Berlin, DE), “Alternative Facts” (2018, Stuttgart, DE), “Odessa Biennial” (2017, Odessa, Ukraine), to name just a few.
