IN BETWEEN OURSELVES

This six-day intensive, July 22–27, 2025 in Iași and Chișinău brings artists, curators and theorists together to exchange practices and perspectives on art, political imaginaries and realpolitik. It includes screenings, presentations, site and studio visits, performance work, an evening of Radio Listening, a red thread of daily group reflection and a series of informal social gatherings. Participation is free, however, in person places are limited, book here by June 22. We provide the bus transport from Iași to Chișinău and return for the first 25 bookings. All other costs are borne by the participants. There is also the possibility of attending part of the programme online, book here for online access.

In Between Ourselves: Perspectives on art, political imaginaries and realpolitik

Questions of the political have been engaged within artistic practice and wider art systems with increasing intensity in recent decades. At the same time we seem to be witnessing radical upheaval in the actualities of everyday political cultures, locally, nationally, and internationally. We are faced with a challenge to consider, that given the rapidity of wider transformations, are these forms of engagement – these strategies, ways of proceeding, operating principles across art and the political – adequate to these changed conditions? And where do we approach these questions from?

And so the sense of the world as rapidly and radically changing has accelerated even more in recent years. The imagery of this upheaval multiplies daily: live-streamed wars, genocides, ethnic-cleansing, climate crisis disasters, and human-caused famines; goading, military provocation and sabotage as the lingua franca of international relations and belligerence-diplomacy; and testimonials of all these streamed and shared to the world via handheld mobile devices of those on the frontlines.

These images reach us in some form or other no matter where we are based. The narratives are always subjected to prejudicial forces, some of which have become even more powerful recently with deregulation of even the already very limited self-policing of social media. Questions as to where we are positioned, how we understand our situatedness, from which vantage point we are looking become more and more important: Are these positions regional, geopolitical, ideological, identitarian or all of these compounded?

The question of the vantage point and (Post)socialism

The transitions from the Cold War worlds of the late 20th Century to the unsettled worlds of 1990s globalisation are among the great transformations of recent history. This resulted in the enforcement of a neoliberal world (dis)order where violence multiplied and diversified its already many forms. These transitions looked very different depending on where one experienced and viewed these from.

For some, this was one world-historical transition in the abrupt emergence of a new unprecedented (post)socialist condition. The collapse of the Cold War geopolitical (dis)order is still contested – What did this transformation mean? What actually changed and what has remained or re-emerged the same? Who do “we” become in the wake of a collapsed world (dis)order? And yet, even as these questions remain contested, in the current moment there is again a sense of this neoliberal globalised world (dis)order collapsing.

The way we respond to these questions of position may draw us to reactions tending both to the left and to the right of the political spectrum. Yet even this left-right spectrum might no longer be adequate to thinking the disarray of rapidly changing political cultures. The divisions of left and right seem to multiply within each individual no longer at the level of dissent between individuals. Under the impact of such chaotic disruption it can seem to become a matter of moral issue or ethical demand to take a clear “side” and to stay ”true” to a political identity. In these circumstances, (Post)socialism has for some become transformed into an identity issue: everything has turned to be about the identity of a region (“the east” understood no longer simply as in contrast or difference to “the west”, but rather as in active opposition.) What is uncommon, what is divergent, within and across the many (Post)socialisms of the 2020s that might not be visible through such essentialist lenses? Amid new great power territorial politics, amid rapid and radical change, what differences can be seen beyond these dichotomies of east and west? What is gained and what is lost in our ability to think the present from this essentialization of “the socialist past” and of “the region”? From what vantage points might it be possible to consider these questions?

If we look at the case of the post-socialist context in which tranzit.ro/ Iași operates, we see a number of possible readings. For some, what is happening is a renewal of the divisions between “East” and “West” and their mutual (re)invention in opposition to each other, re-installing a self-victimizing narrative of the “East” as predated upon by the West. This produces a narrative that disavows agency, responsibility and diversity within a monolithic construction of the “East”. For others what is happening is the further intensification of the exploitation and subordination of the “East” by the “West” reinforcing the actual loss of agency ongoing since 1989. This produces a different narrative frame, one that while being used by some progressive forces can also be opportuned by repressive forces, including those of authoritarian nationalism. Arguably this is what we have seen in the rhetorics used by some parties in the first round of the 2024 presidential elections in Romania.

Iași and Chișinău

This six day meeting (22-27 July 2025) considers what a mobile viewpoint moving between and around Iași and Chișinău might offer to thinking in company with colleagues from elsewhere on these questions. How might this vantage point help dis-entangle the knots of the current political moment?

Chișinău and Iași, although physically less than 150 kilometers distant from each other, or a 2 and half hour drive apart, offer between them a vantage point that troubles any simple reduction of perspective to geography. Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, has made its historical journeys through the geopolitical upheavals and reversals and successive waves of expansion and withdrawal by Ottoman and Russian empires. Iași, located at the north-eastern edge of Romania; formerly at the centre of the principality of Moldavia and formerly part of the northern limit of the Ottoman empire, is now a border city of the European Union, in close proximity to the Ukrainian conflict. These neighbouring cities give us an opportunity to think multiply the question of perspective.

Each city has generated its own particular cultural field and its own cultural energies and dynamics at similar scale and at what may be seen as the intersection areas of larger political conglomerates. Artistic scenes such as Iași and or Chișinău may allow a mobile vantage point because of the intersections and tensions of these larger political conglomerates but also because of their specificity and their relative independence. Our goal is not to think an essentialist view from a given place, but rather to think the changing nuances of view in the movements between different places, as we gather from many places in a shifting view between two neighbouring places.

Livia Pancu, Mick Wilson, Florin Bobu
May 2025

Contributions by: Luminița Apostu Toma (Iași), Valeria Barbas (Chișinău ), Florin Bobu & Livia Pancu (tranzit.ro/ Iași, 1+1), Nora Dorogan & Nicoleta Esinencu (Teatru-Spalatorie, Chișinău ), Lilia Dragneva (Ksa:k, Chișinău), Chris Dreier & Gary Farrelly (Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, Brussels, Berlin), Tatiana Fiodorova (Chișinău), Cătălin Gheorghe (George Enescu Art University Iași), Minna Henriksson (Helsinki), Kristina Jacot (Chișinău), Cezar Lăzărescu (Iași), Diana Mărgărit & Adrian Cioflâncă (Iasi / Bucharest), Maxim Polyakov (3rd space / Kolhoz/ Drujba), Ghenadie Popescu (Chișinău), Andrei Pripasu (ZO Kraft, Iași), Vitalie Sprînceană (Platzforma.md, Chișinău), Oana Toderică (Iași), Vladimir Us (Oberliht Association, Chișinău), Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand/CAPIm)

Co-organised by tranzit.ro/ iași in partnership with 1+1 Association and HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, associated initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm).

The main partner of tranzit.ro is the ERSTE Foundation.

Images: Dan Acostioaei, A Work of Art in the Political and Ideological Context. Public discussion in the frame of The Glitter(y) and the Misery of the European Middle Classes, tranzit.ro/ Iasi, 2017. Photo by Florin Bobu.

Minna Henriksson, Iasi X-ray. Artistic research and exhibition in the frame of the project “Culture Class”, 1 + 1 & tranzit.ro/Iasi, 2020. Photo by Minna Henriksson.

Cezar Lăzărescu, Halta CUG (The Heavy Equipment Factory Train Station). Propaganda walk organized in the frame of The Museum of Real Estate Development, tranzit.ro/ Iasi, 2024. Photo by Florin Bobu.

Bojana Piškur & Đorđe Balmazović, How was the middle class born? (detail). Artistic research in the frame of The Glitter(y) and the Misery of the European Middle Classes, tranzit.ro/ Iasi, 2017.

Jens Haaning, Untitled (Light fitting from the House of the People, Bucharest). Permanent new commission, tranzit.ro/ Iasi, 2018. Photo by Odin Moise.