The waves of contemporary hostility and a weaponised climate today leave us thirsty for a vocabulary that imagines new configurations, and activates a transformative and critical thinking. From the civil rights and women’s liberation movements art, as in images, as in language, as in forms, as in sounds, reveals ugly facts, raises awareness, and ignites united fronts.
Chronic Desire – Sete Cronică is a proposal for vocabularies of looking, feeling and writing, which can be useful instruments for reading the brutal present. This exhibition showcases art practices which can cut in and cut through history and address the current critical political and ecological moment.
When hegemonic histories incline to split us, our situations must be confronted for another kind of freedom that enables our dissimilarities to arise. By shifting our position and worldview, we populate orbits of intersected realities that are in continuous movement. As we move and shift in alliances with each other, we fissure the ground, demolish barriers, and shape new connectors/channels. The title Chronic desire – Sete cronică points, on the one hand, to a recurring, persistent state and, on the other, to the double meaning of the Romanian word “sete”, which means both thirst and desire.
The exhibition Chronic desire – Sete cronica follows three threads: Commons – Landings – History and Subjecthood. These threads meander through the different venues around the city of Timişoara and their legacies of military and industrial heritage.
How do we generate new 'Commons' in the name of revolutionary struggles across race, class, gender, ability, age and sexuality? Landings is devoted to crossover readings of land histories, geological agency and rurality. While colonial histories of western Europe and the Third Worldist projects of the 20th century are evoked in critical global discourse as typical configurations of modernity, the vocabularies of land history, agricultural struggle and supply industries are hardly considered as key narrative protagonists. History and Subjecthood grapples with current toxic climates, from political to environmental landscapes, condensed in the most liminal sense, the one of thirst-sete.
A series of live commissions, performances and talks activate the spaces of the exhibition during the Timișoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture Opening weekend (17-19 February):
