– – the păcurari cug tram – –

The title “The Păcurari-CUG Tram” refers to the two neighborhoods where I spent most of my life; one belonging to my grandparents, the other to my parents. Between these two neighborhoods there has never been public transport that would go from one end of one neighborhood to the other – the only direct connection between them was the personal-affective one, through the memories I made.

The content of the video artwork is made up of distorted archival frames of my grandparents’ apartment superimposed on a video game scene whose virtual environment is a replica of my parents’ neighborhood. The contrast between archival and virtual frames reflects the effect of personal memory: the grandparents’ apartment as I knew it, no longer exists – only the recorded frames still recall its last moments of life.

Although it is real footage, unlike the video game scenes, both frames are in theory virtual images, an imitation of the real. Affective memory does not take concrete reality into account, but creates its own imaginary universe – just as I used to imagine a tram that would have taken me from CUG directly to Păcurari.

The present work is an attempt to continue the narrative created in my dissertation project “What if you embraced your inner stereotype?” – stories about what it means to be a Romanian emigrant.

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