Mediated Memory: Scenarios for Staging the Revolution
Mediated Memory: Scenarios for Staging the Revolution

Summary/Abstract: Mediated Memory. Scenarios for Staging the Revolution interrogates visual testimonies and memoriesof a traumatic past re-accessed through cultural memory. Irina Botea’s video project Auditions for a Revolution (2006)investigates the collective memory of an event – the Romanian Revolution from 1989 – that radically altered the structureof Romanian society. It records a performance given at the Art Institute in Chicago, where the artist asked her fellowstudents and colleagues to audition for the “mise-en-scène” of the Romanian Revolution. Botea’s attempt is inscribed inan almost impossible scenario in terms of credibility and veridicity. Botea makes use of canonic images, and twists themby their juxtaposition with recordings made twenty years after the Revolution, featuring actors who had little access tothe collective memory formed about this socio-cultural space. Instead of reconfiguring and establishing a re-encounterwith the past, she underlines the mediated access to the past through the present, entangling this negotiation in a seriesof disruptions, subverting the creation of a national imagery and the way it is perceived, and ultimately determined, byinternational patterns of representation.

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