In ‘Breakfast’ (2000/2001) and ‘Consuming the City’ (2004), Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor rephrase the abundantly discussed question of consumption. They ask what is lost through the collective process and set of mental attitudes known as consumerism, the unapparent waste consumption produces while it creates and devours its spaces and objects, the holes it breaches in the texture of the world, populated by the shadows of craved things and lost places. Both projects are based on the opposition between human action and the nature it progressively colonizes and destroys, while the shifting signifier in both cases is violence, more accurately the direction in which it is exerted. My contention is that both ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Consuming the City’ work with a similar logic of process mimesis and articulate a context in which “attitudes become food”, that food works in both cases as a medium for the questioning. In the first case, violence is present by implication, while in the second it is the object of an inversion – violence seems to cover homogeneously man’s relation to the environment, wild, fallow or built.
‘Breakfast’ functions almost like a classic allegory, a moral story enacted by transposing elements of this world to characters of another. Only in an allegory would the zebra be talking to the leopard and this could perhaps mirror a victim-victimizer relationship in human life. But, instead of ethical vociferousness illustrating social disparities, what we have here is perfect serenity and quietude, the exact opposite of emphatic wording that would have built the moral answer. The zebra and the leopard are sharing a meal: they have said to each other all the things that needed to be said and there no emergencies. Survival no longer seems a problem, the fittest can share the living space with the less fit and violence has dissolved. Everything stands still and nothing could apparently trouble or threaten the silent affection that unites the two characters. It is as if the most terrible question were formulated with the utmost delicacy, as if imminent danger were noticed with a gentle, almost unnoticeable nod. Tenderness camouflages aggression: the work derives its uncanny strength precisely from this contrast between the delicacy of the performance and the agitated drone of interrogation it engenders, standing like a perfectly still ark on a sea of questions.
‘Consuming the City’ also researches man’s relationship to the environment and the ways in which architecture advances in nature, contrasting this process to economy and drawing a remarkable parallel between serial architecture and the seriality of food. What follows in an extract from an interview I conducted recently with them, clearly outlining the points of the installation.
“In ‘Consuming the City’ we have started from the dual issue of consumption, in architecture and economy. We have worked the way economy processes nature, in several distinct phases. In Innsbruck, where the installation was first created, it was quite clear that each fallow plot of land, located outside the city, was awaiting a new function – there is only a small distance separating agriculture from a supermarket. There the city is conditioned, perhaps more than in other cases, by geography. We have walked both ways of the valley and became aware that the city and its satellites were striving to unite in a continuous tissue, to consume the interstices separating them. We have imitated this dynamic process in the installation now presented at ICCA – we have consumed and what we have consumed became agglutinated and entered the installation. The diversity of food we have consumed was higher in Innsbruck than in Bucharest, but after all it is false diversity, as things are perfectly serialized in the economic domain we have consumed. The same kinds of packages pack roughly the same the same kind of food. Our strategy was to mimic the real economic process in our minor process – reproducing it, a little city of packages resulted, over which we have projected a film about the relation between architecture and nature. Serial consumption is an inverted copy of the dynamic of architecture, of the serial organization of space. We have worked with engineering precision: there were a few small gestures to be performed so that the packs would resemble blocks, it was a minute architectural process. We were expecting those seeing the end result to interact with it as if it were an architectural model, even if our purpose – duplicating the economic process – was rather performative. The situation became absurd in the documentary ‘Landscape’, when we returned with our object to the supermarket, the place it came from but where it should not have existed anymore, being ejected out of economic usage. The city made of packages imitates the real city, since we imitated the economic process of taking nature into possession. When the empty pack is deprived of its economic meaning, it acquires meaning in our process which generates the consumption city.”


Persepolis explores post-socialist dwelling, starting from the realization that “Bucharest contains superimposed patterns of constructed utopia”. If I may be forgiven the pedantic nuisance of a Greek etymology, persepolis was one of Athena’s attributes, meaning “she who destroys cities”. More or less overtly, the memory of ravage is always there in the photographs, as are the residues of ideology and unrestrained political power. Read diachronically, the images show the painful co-existence of three historical strata: early modernism, the particular brand of modernism practiced during communist times, and the contorted ways of new, post-revolutionary architecture. The flotsam of early modernism is what the severe interventions of communist urbanism left behind, as they sought to remap Bucharest by displacement and disruption, producing grids and gridlocks and paralyzing the organic growth of the city. Persepolis includes both the ceremonial and the social type of communist architecture, the first designed to express absolute power and a complete disregard to notions of utility and scale, and the second to replicate endlessly the same precarious suburb, lending itself reluctantly to dwelling and discouraging the establishment of communities. In its turn, the socialist layer sustains today the onslaught of entrepreneurial urban thinking, engulfing and building upon urban dysfunction, adaptable and indifferent to context, channeling peripheral energies of opposition and colonizing space indiscriminately. Old and new ruins are striving to mute each other in cacophonic agglomeration: read synchronically, the images introduce viewers to an architectural war front, a site of collisions or tense juxtapositions between disjointed urban fragments, taking bricolage to the level of state policy and defying the prospect of a restorative master plan.
I would not argue that Persepolis aims to chart this “city in progress”, the Bucharest of emergency and uncertain deadlines, although an interstitial counter-geography, an emergent city mixed in and against the existing one is sometimes noticeable. Instead of cartography, the project makes reference to another visualization device: the panorama. This panorama of Bucharest is “history made visible”, in tandem with the definition proposed by Roland Barthes – yet not in the sense of a linear, impersonal flow of distant history, but “in the flesh” of buildings and places, by reading architecture like a narrative fresco.

By Mihnea Mircan



Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor
Born 1968 / 1974, based in Bucharest, work together since 2000