Prut

Matei Bejenaru

Cover
Softcover

Edition
2018, 16.5 x 23 cm, 216 pp., 152 ill., Romanian/English

Collection
Artist Book Series

ISBN 978-973-0-27993-1

Book concept, editor
Alina Șerban

Authors
Matei Bejenaru, Sezgin Boynik, Puiu Lățea, Anca Verona Mihuleț, Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, Alina Șerban

Design
Andrei Turenici

Begun in 2011, a few years after Romania joined the European Union, the PRUT project is a documentary photographic archive that currently contains around 1,500 negatives. The process of mapping the territory of the Prut River basin, now the easternmost natural frontier of the new European political construct, has for meant for the artist an artistic engagement with an almost invisible rural world. After almost seven years of travelling around the territory, interacting with people and communities, the images contained in this publication reconstruct the multiple facets, both good and bad, of the dynamic of change to which the Prut region has been subject. Organising the visual materials collected via research into five chapters—Territory, Habitation, Economy, People, and Daily Life—the publication presents, subjectively, phenomena and manifestations of life and material culture that are characteristic of the communities in the Prut area, capturing the way in which they learned to manage their position under the pressures of the new economic and social mechanisms of the neoliberal order.

Publication supported by: AFCN, UniCredit Bank 

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Interview with
Matei Bejenaru

1 / 5
Alina Șerban: What triggered the fascination, as well as your artistic commitment to the social topography of the Romanian territory close to the Prut River? How are we to understand this thorough cataloguing of a rural territory circumscribed to a life dynamic in which we can find the flaws of a (Socialist) past which is yet to be consummated and the challenges of a present shaped by the impulse of the capital?
Firstly, it was my interest in bringing in the artistic context a subject matter that I considered as unfairly marginalized. The contemporary Romanian culture is dominated by the issues of urban elites, I understand this, however, at the same time, and I think that we cannot dismiss the issues of half of the population. The territory that I document through my photographs, the rural area of the basin of the Prut River, the Eastern border of Romania and of the European Union, has its own issues and dynamics which go beyond the historical stages of the Communism or of the Capitalism. In fact, modern Romania, during more than one hundred and fifty years, failed to emancipate in depth its rural world. In my opinion, this is one of the great failures of our modernist country project.
2 / 5
How important is it for your working process the idea of duration, as well as the ritual of (re)cognition of the territory and of the people inhabiting it? Why (did you choose) photography as a medium of rendition, touch and contact with this universe?
Indeed, this project of constructing a visual archive has a special relationship with time. On the one hand, I am aware of the fact that the images from the present will be read in a different manner for one or two generations, when the world will have undergone significant changes. At the same time, the technological platforms for producing photographs will be different in the future, the current images storing also a memory of the medium. To me, photography is the medium by which I interact with a reality. I do not feel the need to take notes, nor do I need to draw a certain subject. All of my energy is channeled to take a photograph containing complex information about the subject matter in which I am interested. The act of taking photos is crucial to me, the same way as the ethics of representation is. Documentary photographs are the interstitia, the bridges of connection between me and a world of which I am not a part. My connection with photographs is intensely emotional because it is about my life and the meaning of time lapse.
3 / 5
I would undoubtedly call this photographic documentary rhizomatic, as it reflects on the manner in which the change occurred in the local social space, after Romania’s accession to the EU, is lived differently by these communities. How would you characterize the (emotional and material) reality outlined by the PRUT photographic series?
Trying to give a poetic answer, I would say that the images from the Prut project give back to us multiple forms of dignity: the dignity of the clay from Moldavia’s plateau, the dignity of the teenagers I met on the main street of the village on a Sunday, in their best garments, just like the actors in video clips or soap operas, the dignity of the wells dug painstakingly in times of draught, the dignity of commuters who spend 2-3 hours a day in buses which take them to and from their jobs in Iasi, the dignity of the smooth and deforested hills, the dignity of the old ladies who have a tab opened with the village store.
4 / 5
Many of the photographs of this series, beyond the features specific to an aesthetic of the painting, highlight a certain alignment to a traditional way of living. They are speaking to us about the emergence of new individual forms of subsistence, about the new working conditions of those who stayed/left, an effect of a life organization manner dictated by financial capital. They render the structural inconsistencies of a reality which is ever transforming and which is, unknowingly, floating adrift.
The more we have known the rural world of which we are talking, the more we have understood the dynamism of changes. In fact, villages are themselves caught in the pace of the changes, alternative economies emerged, and information technology is accessible wherever there is a GSM signal. We talked in a Sunday market, a fair, with a craftsman who made horse harnesses and who confessed to me that, year by year, he is selling less and less accessories, which tells me that the number of horse-carts is dramatically declining. If we are talking about floating adrift, then I would like to point out the fact that the rural world, after having lost its traditional identity, became marginal, peripheral and I believe that this phenomenon occurred everywhere in the world. With us, only in several places, the rural universe became the refuge of those saturated with the excesses of urban life.
5 / 5
Can we see this series as an anthropological investigation? There is, I believe, a dimension highlighted by the photographs in this series, which is not limited only to the way in which the image incorporates reality, but also to the materiality of the medium and to the emotional connections created through your interaction with these communities.
Yes, there is an anthropological dimension in the project photographs. People of all ages are present in the images. The way in which they are looking at the camera, the context in which their photos are taken, their attitude, provide us with much information about their lives. I am indeed interested in the materiality of the project images. They are all realized on film developed by myself in my own personal photo lab. For me, they are conceptual sculptures organized firstly in a chronological order, and then according to various criteria. All photographic negatives have a quality, have been physically present at a certain distance from the subject they depict, and this fact, alongside with the intrinsic time of each image, makes a profound impression upon me and moves me forward with the project.