Maria
Crista
The way we live in a better world: on a work by Cezar Lazarescu
What can one see from Romania?
Until not long ago, in civilized Europe there lived the other.
Civilized Europe was somewhere in the west, free, democratic, tolerant
and fair. Not the discussion about the myths between east and west is
the most important here, but the one about the projects and realities
of these worlds, about the ways in which societies build their reality/
history and about their capacity to notice the signs of failure. The
project "France 05" of Cezar Lazarescu is not only about France,
it makes me think of the better world we want to live in.
Using press images, from the time of protests in November 2005, Cezar
Lazarescu records a moment of visibility for the people who are ignored.
However, not the moments in themselves, when these people express their
pain and anger towards the unjust world they live in, are raising in
us anxiety, but all those things that caused them and which at a closer
inspection become shrilling. Such things are the statistics published
by Reuters immediately after the protests, which say that one of three
French people declares oneself a racist. What exactly makes people act
and be in a certain way? It's as if memory is always too fragile in
the world that is born again with each generation.
In spite of the knowledge which seems to be more and more accessible,
in spite of the fact that the traumas of humanity are so much present,
people prefer to build their self-confidence on the hatred towards the
other.
In the ghetto there lives, usually, "the most other" who is
not equal with you because (s)he is always different and has always
less chances. But where does the reality of the ghetto start? How many
times do we ask ourselves how much power we have and what do we do with
it? The physical space is first a symbolic space. What we imagine and
what we believe often becomes part of reality, like a construction which
before existing as such, appears first as a project.
Cezar's work is a sign, a sign about the ghetto, which essentially tells
a story about a failed project (and which makes one ask: what need to
center the world on themselves makes people say that the other is so
different and so unimportant?)
Maria Crista
Cezar Lazarescu is an artist living and working
in Iasi.
Maria Crista is an artist, member of H.arta group, based in Timisoara.