Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (45.2012)

7 7. Irina Botea: Casa Poporului (People's House), 2003, digitalprint.
Photo: Beproduced mth permission of the artist.

12. Irina Botea: Casa Poporului (People's House), 2003, digitalprint.
Photo: Bsproduced mth permission of the artist.


Stands still today as the second largest government
building in the world. In the Romanian psyché, the
People’s House holds a particularly traumatic place,
as its gigantic silhouette rose, throughout the 1980s,
from the brutal démolitions of Bucharest’s historical
core. In the short video animation Pätuta lui Opricä
(Opricä’s Dance), Botea forces a much diminished
cardboard version of the building to join other part-
ners in kitsch (lawn dwarfs, bunnies, Snow White,
ladybugs — all antidotes to the seriousness of the
colossal), in a lively dance [Fig 10].
The video subverts the building’s symbolic and
physical heft on many levels; certainly, by vertigi-
nously diminishing its size, the palace is made inof-
fensive, trivialized into an innocuously décorative
knick-knack, easily dismissed or damaged, rather
than mighty and oppressive. Displayed as a miniature
among others, the video turns an object of traumatic
memory into a gift-shop souvenir, and, as a resuit,
denounces the communist monument’s origin in
petit-bourgeois subjectivity. The video also shifts
the register from the official, classicizing language
of the People’s House architecture to an irreverent
vernacular, signified both in the Gypsy music and
the lowbrow garden Ornaments. The miniature,
placed between toys, defuses the mythical into the
humorous.
Other reversais are at play; the chronic state of
incompleteness of the People’s House, which, like yet
another a grotesque hungry body, kept growing and
engulfing labor and materials for almost a decade,

13. Irina Botea: Casa Poporului (People’s House), 2003, digitalprint.
Photo: Reproduced mth permission of the artist.


is here reduced into the finite, rapidly made, flimsy
cardboard construction; a photo of Irina Botea hold-
ing the paper palace in her hand inverses the original
relation of power and vulnerability, and transposes
the collective monument into the realm of the private
[Fig. Il], Finally, a sériés of photographs stage the
cardboard reproduction of the People’s House in
a variety of settings, and, like Angelopoulos’ Lenin,
allow the colossus to become mobile, floating, vaga-
bonding [Figs. 12, 13].
Ambiguous Cinéma
In this article, l’ve been taking up the possibility
that these films constitute a cultural manifestation

15