Casa Scanteii: Controled Media Factory

Thursday, 22 October 2009, 19.00
 
Form and function, two concepts at hand when dealing conceptually with a building. How it is designed, how it is used. Add public sphere, and human behaviour within a delineated professional frame. Add the power of ideology at different points of time—power to move society in a certain direction, for instance by means of architectural design—or words such as control, order and play. Placed in front of the very large Casa Presei Libere building (the Free Press House) at the outskirts of downtown Bucharest, these conceptual tools and many more can be used in an exploration of its identity, yet hardly to produce any account as to its essential meaning. Too much is going on inside the building, too much has happened since it was built.
 
“Every building is experienced as a concrete reality,” writes architect Thomas A. Markus. Smells and sounds, doors leading here and there, familiar and unfamiliar faces—the entire experience is unique. When one starts putting labels on buildings (like “The House of the Spark” or “Free Press House”) one also substitutes for a complex reality. Names, comments, analysis, as well as photos and plans, are texts that fail to reproduce the rich reality of buildings, “above all the the unique experience of being within space together with other people”. A large and heavy building such as the Free Press House thus contain a degree of unavoidable fragility in its sheer name.
 
A space so meticulously controlled by one single part as that of Casa Scinteii during the communist era may have offered little room for individual particularities. The repertoire of meaning-making aspects of the building then was perhaps less wide-ranging than today, revealing a tighter relationship between form and function. With post-socialism entered a challenge to the very notion of meaning, especially incredulity to certain grand narratives, alongside some degree of creative disorder and slippages of meaning. New layers were added.
 
Urban Larssen is a PhD-candidate and assistant lecturer in social anthropology at Stockholm University, and a former reporter with Swedish local dailies. He is currently completing a thesis on journalism in Romania and its connections to global freedom of speech activism.
 
The lecture is part of "Exploring the Return of Repression" project, curated by Razvan Ion. The exhibition is on view until 22 November 2009, at PAVILION UNICREDIT.
 
 

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