Romanian artist Vlad Nancă is in charge of the column Archival Impulses, a recurrent item on our editorial agenda in which we plunge into the not-so-distant and not-so-deep sea of archives that washes our digital present. For the first issue of The Future of, Nancă’s dive into the agitated waters of nostalgia is guided by Svetlana Boym’s axiom that embodies the evolution of the twentieth century. The selection of images is the result of the artist’s involvement with the Mihai Oroveanu Image Collection, currently in the care of Anca Oroveanu and Salonul de proiecte, a Bucharest-based independent art space focused on research and production.

With regards to the photographic image, nostalgia works in a relatively simple manner: it fixes itself upon graphic details that provoke certain emotions of longing, melancholy, and desire. Like a fog of remembering that refuses to fade away, nostalgia augments visual scraps and filters them alive, surviving therefore the passage of time and living in a continuously malleable capsule that bends over time and space. While working with images produced in twentieth-century Romania—in this case, the Mihai Oroveanu collection—I look for uncanny details that have the potential to spark such ventures into my own nostalgia for futures that never came into being.

I have selected a series of images from the Oroveanu collection that can function as a critical mechanism for researching recent histories, but also as a speculative mood board: a kind of ahead-of-its-time Pinterest that would have been used by middle-class families in the century that, according to Svetlana Boym, “began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.” At the centre of my search reside visual fragments that reflect Europe’s emerging middle-class ambitions and aspirations in the twentieth century: samples of wealth, recreation, and well-being that have manifested themselves differently across the century and the continent. 

When these fragments are taken separately, they may come across as trivial particles of everyday life. But when taken together, they speak of broader notions such as (de)coloniality, the utopia of a classless society, architecture and modernism, war, or the mere prospect of leisure time. At the same time, I do not read these images as authentic history and I am well aware of the constructed nature of these visual compositions and their subjects (photographer or photographed, creator and created, alike). Instead, I simply seek to extract certain slices of meaning—layers of nostalgia—that inform my artistic practice and pique my interest in general. 

When it comes to showing off wealth, Bucharest’s bourgeois families do not differ that much from their aristocratic counterparts reigning across Europe. One such uncanny display of affluence is represented by the decoration of private homes with exotic plants, which are visible in staged family photographs. Brought to Europe after long colonial expeditions, these plants have become objects that embody capital and status. Agents of colonialism that are instrumentalised and weaponised by the ruling classes; free-flowing manifestations of wealth and power that take the strange form of botanical privilege. The burden of colonial violence is only stripped away when these plants increase in popularity and migrate to new territories, ultimately transcending social classes. In these socio-economic and cultural processes, the symbolic value of exotic plants is written anew. In their altered state, exotic plants, such as Monstera deliciosa, Washingtonia, and Yucca, become increasingly popular in socialist Romania. They evolve into widespread forms of decoration that are present in domestic homes, but also in the interior design of seaside resorts, and beyond.

After following the stalinist guidelines coming from the further east, Romanian architecture returns to the modernism of the 1930s, opens up to the West, and then witnesses a revival in the 1960s, when a purely modernist vision, with clean aesthetics, straight lines, and large volumes, is brought to life. There are countless examples of precious architectural masterpieces all over Eastern Europe that have been resurfaced in recent years under the shared canopy of the so-called ‘socialist modernist’ style.

In this context, I am fascinated by the popularisation of tubular furniture, with its charming cylindrical shapes and chunky silhouettes made out of steel. The ideals of the Bauhaus school—utilitarian, simple, robust, and practical design is preferred over the excess of the ornament that reigned over the previous century—transcend across decades and borders, as well as the East-West divide, and reach Romanian socialism in the 1960s. 

The interior design of the hotels that start sprouting along the Black Sea coast in the 1960s begins to imitate those in western and northern Europe. Socialist Romania welcomes even more tourists from abroad who are particularly enchanted by the cosmic constellation that they find here: Neptun, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. A contemporary reading of these images originating from the 1970s and 1980s immediately provokes a retro-optimistic interpretation: it is not difficult to perceive those decades as being fun and sexy.

However, the socio-economic reality of the era was completely different. It is Disco Ring in Costinești that particularly emerges as a sanctuary for the (post-)hippy generation, a place that could have been easily mistaken for internationally renowned party centres such as Ibiza, Costa Brava, or Madeira. The nostalgia that the twentieth century ended with may not be a mere nostalgia for modernity, but a nostalgia for its everyday; the everyday as a lived or imagined experience which today manifests itself as a longing for a different time. Especially now, during a global pandemic, the everyday of the past seems more stable, more safe, more gratifying.