I was watching the news one night, when all of a sudden, the announcer begins to talk about the opening of the biggest mall from Bucharest. “Another one,” I was about to say… But, I did have time. I would have been terribly mistaken, anyway…. Although it is partially finished, thousands of people that flocked in like sheep to find a place in front, when the doors will be opened, besieged the Commercial Center that I am talking about. I wonder what were they expecting to see, because there is nothing else but shops and shopping baskets for them to fill to the brim. Let us not forget that the economic news are talking about the plague called crises and the Bucharestians tread upon each other’s feet to get to the newest mall. Afterwards, I thought that they might have been promised promotional alms or discounts, but I still cannot find a rational motivation for this hysteria.
Oh, and this news reminded me of The Czech Dream, a movie that I saw at TIFF a few years ago and that is still very actual. There a fiction was sold to the people. The Czech Dream Commercial Centre, whose opening occasioned a great agitation and was backed up by an amazing advertising campaign, was in reality a structure made of props. Namely, some panes installed on a field that from a distance seemed a building. However, such a thing didn’t cross the minds of the consumers, the favorite victims of “an even bigger mall”; they didn’t even care. The greed made them run with the shopping baskets across an endless field, thinking that they might benefit from a superabundant offer of products, just to find out that everything was an illusion, no more than that.
The world according to Ion B, Alexander Nanau’s documentary, (produced and broadcasted by HBO) had its premiere at the beginning of the year. I am writing about it now because of a very “warm” news. I found out that Ion Bârlădeanu, the artist discovered near a container, talked for two hour with Angelina Jolie. It happened in Paris, at Anne de Villepoix Gallery, were the exhibitions Realpolitik with his collages was opened. The images with the two of them, Angelina smiling while showing to Ion Bârlădeanu something on her iPhone, seem one of the artist’s collages. Some surrealist images…
Nevertheless, in the end, Ion Bîrlădeanu’s case- the 62 years old homeless guy, who dreamt in his youth of becoming an actor and afterwards a director, who hated the communists, remained an unadaptable even after the Revolution: he collected magazines, he cut out characters and he reorder the world in this manner- the reality is now the biggest fiction.
Author of more than 800 collages that he entitled “movies” and that have a subversive political message is now in the position of a fabulous documentary character. Even Alexander Nanau, emphatic and discreet, suggests a collage- documentary about the artist form the container. The question that the characters from the documentary, The World According to Ion B, answer in their specific way, is the one from the beginning of the story:”Has anything ever fallen on your head?” and it refers not just to trash, but also to luck, to the chance that sometimes comes unexpectedly and when nobody believes in it anymore.
