In 2007 I built a miniature replica of the room I shared with my parents as a child. My time there was marked by debasement and deteriorating human interactions, and by an ominous sense of being predestined for failure. I reconstructed the room as an exercise in magical thinking whereby irrational, maladaptive tactics of controlling reality would be used against the place that had engendered them. The goal of this action was to indirectly bring about the destruction of an actual room in the house located at 5 T. Vladimirescu Street in the town of Salonta, Romania.
By 2009 occupied by one last relative, the house had become dilapidated. It was eventually brought by an Austrian supermarket chain prospecting the economic horizons opened up by Romania's accession to the EU. The house was torn down in the spring of 2010.
Its replica will be embedded in the concrete foundation of the pennyMarket scheduled to be built on the site at a future date. It will remain invisible and irretrievable, a lingering opaque marker of a vanquished past. More here.
andra ursuta
