Catalin Mitulescu, ‘Cum mi-am petrecut sfarsitul lumii’ (The way I spent the end of the world) (2006)
Tragi-comic coming-of-age tale, set in 1989 Romania, which follows 17 year old Eva and her younger brother Lilu. After knocking down a bust of Ceausescu by accident, Eva is sent to a technical school where she meets Andrei, with whom she plans to escape communist Romania by swimming across the Danube into Yugoslavia and relocate to Italy. Meanwhile, Lilu and his friends volunteer for a children’s choir scheduled to sing for Ceausescu, hoping this will give them a chance to assassinate the dictator.
After a decade of unprecedented real estate development, Madrid starts to deal with its contemporary ruins: on one hand, more than 47,000 empty apartments wait for a first buyer (Asprima report/Dec.2009), and on the other, hundreds of kilometres of perfectly paved streets run between eerie blocks, waiting for a first construction on their sides.
‘Road Trip through Madrid’s Bubble Challenge’ is an on-going photo-reportage of these frozen in time areas of development. Can they become the natural protected areas of the future?
The photographs were taken during the month that Olaf Nicolai ran a beauty parlor in the center of Tilburg in the Netherlands. He offered to bleach visitors’ hair free of charge, in exchange for the permission to use images of them in his work.
A sound activated tape recorder travels overnight through the UK Post Office. The dictaphone automatically edits the 15 hour journey down to a 72min recording, capturing only the significant sounds right up until the parcel is signed for at the end, where it is to be exhibited in a self storage building.
