Irina Botea
Auditions for a Revolution Video installation, mini-DV and 16mm film on mini-DV, transferred to DVD, 22 min., English and Romanian, 2006
In
Auditions for a Revolution,
the Romanian artist Irina Botea engages with the Romanian revolution of
December 1989. The images of this revolution, which was the first to be
broadcast on television – the famous scene in the besieged TV-studio –
have deeply embedded themselves in the collective memory. In December
2005, exactly 16 years after the revolution, Irina Botea invited young
people in Chicago – drama school students – to “auditions for a
revolution”.
Scene by scene, they go through the television images of 1989, and
re-enact the situations and constellations. At first, the gestures of
2005 seem a little robotic and funny, but gradually the actors perform
their roles with increasing skill. Botea, who witnessed the events
personally, gets the young Americans to speak the original dialogues
from the videos and films of 1989. The difficulties that arise from
pronouncing the Romanian language, which the actors cannot speak,
become an impressive metaphor for the difficulties of reading history.
The
artist juxtaposes the original material from 1989 (which were also used
by Harun Farocki in Videogramme einer Revolution, 1992) with recordings
of the re-enactments that she made of precisely the same scenes with
the students in December 2005. The new scenes were recorded on video
and 16 mm film.(1) Through confronting a document with its recreation,
a strange alliance of these two time periods develops, while at the
same time an immense gap becomes apparent.
Irina Botea’s work
is an attempt to (re-)inscribe oneself in a sequence of media images
that constitutes history. Possibly, it is also an attempt to develop
sympathy with the more or less active protagonists of a historical
situation to which we now only have access in a strongly
media-dependent form.
Inke Arns
(1) The 16 mm film camera, which the
artist bought from a Romanian company that specialises in
documentaries, was probably the actual camera used to film the
revolution in 1989.
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