VLAD NANCĂ

CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN: REVISITING FUTURISMS OF THE PAST

The exhibition borrows its title from Depeche Mode’s Construction Time Again (1983). Informed by what the band described as the day-to-day reality of the Thatcher era, the album reflected concerns such as economic inequality, social solidarity, and environmentalism. In Nancă’s exhibition, the phrase shifts from the factory floor to a speculative planetary horizon. Amid current extractivism, climate crisis, and the erosion of welfare structures, the artist envisions a world in which humanity begins anew, from the ground up. Detached from the economic and ideological systems that once shaped—and distorted—them, modernist forms are afforded a clean slate.

Nancă echoes modernism’s futuristic ethos in mosaic works depicting celestial bodies and artificial satellites. He isolates details of large-scale mosaics from across Eastern Europe, featuring astronauts and scientists, and re-contextualizes them as watercolor interventions within a modernist grid integrated into the outline of a building side façade. Elsewhere, he reinterprets the image of a miner from Valea Jiului as a contemporary “weeping icon”, with an exaggerated, emoji-like tear. Throughout the exhibition, he repeatedly revisits the architectural language of collective housing in Bucharest during the 1950s and 1960s, marked by type-design and prefabrication. The welded mesh panel, a proxy for a prefabricated wall; the iron silhouettes that enlarge two scale figures extracted from a 1957 cover of Arhitectura; the sand sculptures modeling two buildings from Floreasca: the low-rise that houses Gaep and one of the six apartment towers erected near the lake; and the montage of five Romanian films from the 1960s, which sutures together scenes of leisure and work in and around new buildings—all point to the architects’ attempt to work out a model for design and construction that integrated functional clarity, technical innovation, low costs, modes of life, and the imperative of collective living.

Long considered peripheral to the Western historical master narrative due to the Cold War, this model nevertheless “shared its ideals, metaphors, and attitudes towards tradition with Western modernist ideas about the city.” As Juliana Maxim observes, “in the critique that the elites of the time leveled against Bucharest’s ‘anarchic development’ and in the eradication of what the regime saw as blighted peripheries, one finds, recycled and amplified, key principles of modernist architecture and planning.”[1] Nancă’s work reactivates fragments of this past while proposing their careful recalibration. As technology frog-marches us into the future, he adopts a retrospective gaze not to indulge nostalgia, but to critically examine unrealized projects of the past—or cancelled futures—and to engage with futures-thinking. Within his speculative scenario of a new beginning on another planet, architecture becomes a process of calibration, and construction an act of care rather than expansion.

At its core, modernism was an architectural reset button driven by a strong—if at times hubristic—sense of hope. Nancă’s work is itself animated by a form of hope—an awareness of complexities and uncertainties, coupled with the will to act. Because “hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope,” as Rebecca Solnit writes. [2] Nancă’s gesture of construction (again) is about identifying the wasted potential of the past and latent possibilities of the present, and working toward a more habitable future.

[1] Juliana Maxim, The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest 1949-1964, Taylor & Francis, 2018, p. 58

[2] Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Canongate, 2016, p. 4

---

Sand Blocks

‘Betoane de nisip’ (Sand concrete)—the title of a recent issue of Revista Arhitectura dedicated to the construction of Romania’s seaside resorts—resonates with Vlad Nancă’s sculptures too. Inspired by Mircea Săucan’s film Țărmul n-are sfârșit/The Endless Shore (1962), the artist recreates in sand two buildings from Floreasca.

The smaller structure is the low-rise, bar-like building that houses Gaep. Built in the late 1950s, it reflects the first phase in the development of the district, one of the most prominent architectural projects of the decade. The taller structure is one of the six identical apartment towers erected in 1963, which marked a shift in how architects and political elites envisioned the city. As Juliana Maxim writes in ‘The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest 1949-1964’, “they became easily recognizable landmarks, and large photographic panoramas clearly delighted in revealing their place on Bucharest’s skyline. Legible from far away and, more specifically, from the historic center of the capital, the towers reordered the city by giving the new, once-peripheral neighborhoods a visual predominance formerly reserved for the historic core.” [3]

Between 1956 and 1963, Floreasca was an experimental ground for designing collective housing and the use of standard components and prefabricated panels. “In its form and organization, Floreasca was equal parts functional city and socialist urban manifesto.” [4] It showed that the state relied not on architecture generically, but specifically on the principles of architectural modernism: efficiency, standardization, rationality, and visual abstraction. It also embodied both a rationalist model of total planning and a belief in urban poetics.

Beyond foregrounding the area’s significance within the local history of modernism, Nancă addresses the tension between durability and ephemerality in architecture. By reconstructing the buildings in sand, he strips them of their perceived permanence.

Conceived for display in the gallery window, Sand Blocks also establishes a connection between the built environment and the park across the street, echoing modernist ideals of continuity between indoor and outdoor spaces.

Future Landscapes

This group of four archival photographs with mosaic interventions crystallizes the futuristic ethos underlying Vlad Nancă’s exhibition. His speculative scenario of relocating modernism to another planet, where it is granted a second chance, finds a clear articulation in these collages. The Murano glass interventions stand for the colonised planet, while the archival images show the use of prefabricated components—a method that aligned both Western and Eastern European architectural practices with the modernist agenda.

The works can also be read as a reflection on the roles assigned to architectural knowledge within modernity. As David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun argue, architects are expected to operate as technicians of spatial development, their first task being the commodification of space; the second, an “artistic” one, involves expressing or intensifying the spatial experience of modernity; the third task is an avant-garde one and entails imagining alternative socio-spatial futures. [5] Nancă’s collages transpose these ideas into an imaginary world, where the third task becomes an urgent condition for redefining the first two.

Builders

The rebar silhouettes recreate two scale figures featured on the cover of a 1957 issue of Arhitectura RPR (later Arhitectura). Removed from their original context, they are nevertheless placed in the exhibition in relation with an architectural element—a proxy for a prefabricated wall. Enlarged to a 1:1 scale, the figures are given the chance to “catch up” with the architectural surface they once served to measure.

The metal silhouette is a recurring element in Vlad Nancă’s practice. As Petrică Mogoș writes in ‘Vlad Nancă: In the Natural Landscape the Human Is an Intruder’, “its structure remains open on the inside, but not in an empty sense. The inner core of Nancă’s silhouettes is not barren but invisible, like a utopian portal toward cancelled futures.” [6]

Engaging with a simplified monumentality, Nancă’s silhouettes gesture toward a possible post-human monument. In Builders, they appear to emerge from an unprimed canvas—an Arte Povera-like juxtaposition of organic and industrial materials. This suggests not only that no work of the present—or the future—can be disentangled from its art historical lineage, but also that the essence of an artwork lies less in its materiality than in its vital transformation of energy.

Companion

The full wall panel was the ultimate form of prefabrication, a construction technology intensively pursued after 1960 for collective housing. Designed to minimize on-site labor under the imperatives of efficiency and cost reduction, it became “the most visible and best-known manifestation of architects’ efforts to integrate type-design and construction” [7]

Vlad Nancă isolates one of its constituent elements—the welded mesh, in its standard dimensions of 3 x 2.7 meters—and transforms it into a versatile structure that functions both as a support for a mosaic work and as a spatial divider, one that guides movement through the exhibition rather than separating it.

With this work, the artist returns to the motif of the grid. A recurring element in his practice, the grid is “a relic of socialism and modernism at once.” [8] For Nancă, beyond his idiosyncratic fascination with it, the grid operates as an architectural instrument, but also as a conceptual device that stages a confrontation between movements and paradigms, between art and architectural history, between culture and politics.

In Companion, the grid is the expansive background against which a satellite and a bird appear to take flight. Both elements derive from a large-scale mosaic on the façade of Café Moskau in Berlin. Made between 1961 and 1964 and titled Aus dem Leben der Völker der Sowjetunion (From the Life of the Peoples of the Soviet Union), it is an ambitious composition that brings together silhouettes of trees, a Sputnik satellite, doves of peace, dams and power lines, old Russian churches, the Kremlin, and a wide array of human figures (peasants, fishermen, shepherds, workers, children).

Nancă selects the satellite and a white dove for their broadly legible symbolism of space exploration and, respectively, pacifism. At the same time, given their original context, their juxtaposition foregrounds the tension between the realities of Cold War space race and the aspirational rhetoric of peace. It also points to the political layer of scientific achievement (Sputnik, Earth’s first artificial satellite, marked the start of the U.S.-U.S.S.R space race) and artistic production (Picasso’s 1949 lithograph Dove became a symbol of peace).

Salina

The image of a mineworker, drawn from a mosaic in Vulcan (Hunedoara county), is reinterpreted as a contemporary ‘weeping icon’ with an exaggerated, emoji-like tear.

Working often with a retrospective approach to 20th-century decorative art, Vlad Nancă reconfigures existing imagery, proposing new readings shaped both by his own aesthetic and by layers of collective historical knowledge. Today, the figure of the miner evokes a complex set of associations: events such as the Lupeni strike of 1929, the strikes of 1984-85 in the UK, and the ‘mineriads’ of the early 1990s; profound socio-economic transformations—from a once huge industrial sector to widespread unemployment, as well as competing narratives shaped by political ideologies.

In Nancă’s mosaic, this figure situated at the crossroads of Romania’s 20th-century history is given an explicit emotional charge. The miner in Salina appears to weep for both the decline of local mining communities and the environmental consequences of global extractivism. He is rendered through a technique traditionally associated with permanence, while the background is made of stone—a mineral matter.

Dream Fragment series

The series Dream Fragment functions as a telescope directed toward new cosmic horizons. In each work, one or two grey cardboard squares within the grid are replaced by delicate watercolor drawings reproducing details from mosaic works across Eastern Europe. Most of these depict astronauts, scientists or planets, echoing the rich cosmic iconography of the mosaics, particularly after the start of the space race.

Vlad Nancă signals the origins of these source images by incorporating fragments of Murano glass and by sketching the façades of buildings for which such large-scale mosaics were originally created.

An emblematic structure of modernism and a recurring element in the artist’s practice, the grid organizes the compositions without flattening them. Formally, its typical flatness is offset by the watercolor interventions. Conceptually, the grid operates as a framework that opens onto the imagination. As Rosalind Krauss observes, “the grid’s power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction).” [9]

With this series of ten works on paper, Nancă extends his engagement with futures-thinking—the practice of exploring possible futures and examining processes of change—as well as his speculative scenario of relocating modernism onto another planet.

Modern

A montage of Romanian films from the 1960s, Modern sutures together scenes of leisure, love and work set within the new buildings that emerged in Bucharest during that period. As one character remarks, “we built this city, now let’s live.” („Am ridicat orașul, acum hai să trăim.”)

In collaboration with film editor Cătălin Cristuțiu, Vlad Nancă selected sequences from five feature films: Țărmul n-are sfârșit (1962, dir. Mircea Săucan), Gioconda fără surâs (1967, dir. Malvina Urșianu), Ultima noapte a copilăriei (1968, dir. Savel Știopul), Șeful sectorului suflete (1967, dir. Gheorghe Vitanidis), and Un film cu o fată fermecătoare (1966, dir. Lucian Bratu).

The video work makes visible a dual understanding of architecture as both a pragmatic endeavor and a narrative construct capable of articulating Bucharest’s transformation into a modern city. The new apartments, the housing districts under construction, the bustling restaurants and futuristic workspaces featured in the films point to an architecture tasked not only with providing efficient housing solutions, but also with generating an affective and aesthetic experience. This is captured in images with dynamic perspectives and forms picked out in stark contrast, which broadcast uplifting messages about life in the city.

One of the questions raised by this montage is to what extent the attempt to rediscover the architecture of the 1950s and 1960s can lead to a constructed nostalgia. For his part, Nancă applies critical thinking to the polarizing concept of nostalgia and takes into account an understanding of nostalgia as a creative, future-oriented strength. As Petre Mogoș writes, “nostalgia can be an effective device to imagine possible futures. (…) Nostalgia needs to go beyond longing for romantic ruins and, rather, be regarded as a transitory stage of inquiry into our future selves.” [10] In this way, Modern functions as a binding element between all the works in the exhibition.

---

[3] Maxim, Taylor & Francis, 2018

[4] Maxim, Taylor & Francis, 2018

[5] Cunningham & Goodbun, Marx, Architecture and Modernity, The Journal of Architecture, 2006

[6] Vlad Nancă: In the Natural Landscape the Human Is an Intruder, Dispozitiv Books, 2020

[7] Maxim, Taylor & Francis, 2018

[8] Stefaan Vervoort

[9] Rosalind Krauss, Grids, In: October, The MIT Press, 1979

[10] Kajet Journal, Notes on the Future of Nostalgia