Precarious Spaces and Subjects in Transition: Postcommunism and Romanian Moving Image Art

Abstract

This article considers the works of artist and activist Joanne Richardson and of the D-Media Collective, which stem from the aim to investigate relations between media, art, and politics, and to critically re-assess the Romanian postcommunist space-time. The works, all made between 2007 and 2008, are part of the Commonplaces of Transition project. I argue that they retrospectively reflect on changes of almost two decades prior to their making, and are an active struggle to not let the “postcommunist condition” be fixed in recent history, but wish to complicate and decolonise it, especially from anticommunist views dominant in Romania in this period. I am interested in investigating the arching relations existent between postcommunist subjectivity, the notion of transition, and articulations of space in postcommunism. I argue that transition has rendered both postcommunist subjects and spaces precarious and I consider Richardson’s work with D-Media collective instrumental in updating and critically assessing notions like “precarity”, from a feminist, local perspective, highly self-reflexive and aware of the risk of producing self-colonising narratives.