We decided to write this biography together, because the parts of our lives which are relevant for this book happened to us while being together and also many of our future plans involve our being together. Our names are Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant and Rodica Tache, we are in our early thirties and we all graduated the Painting Department of the Art Academy from Timisoara, in 2000 and 2001. This is also how we met, during our studies. In 2001 we started to work together as h.arta group, organising workshops, discussions and exhibitions in a former industrial space in Timisoara. We were having this space for free, and this was a very important advantage that allowed us at the beginning of our activities as artists, when we were completely inexperienced, to experiment and to use this project space as a way to learn about the possibilities of collaborative work and of art. The projects that we did in this space, in the first h.arta space, were done with very little budgets or with almost no budget and the space itself was only a big empty room, without furniture, heating, telephone or internet connection. We were improvising this entire infrastructure for each project and the space was having a sort of pulsating life (sometimes being just a huge, cold, empty room, sometimes, for the times of projects, filling up with objects, sounds and people). We were never paid for the projects that we did in this space, and meanwhile we were having other jobs, mostly as schoolteachers, teaching Art Education in high schools. Back than, this job was kind of safe (even if it was a temporary job, because we were substitute teachers, changing the schools every year). The curricula that we were supposed to teach had no connection to our own interests and beliefs, and the job itself was tiresome and time consuming, but still this job had a big relevance for our artistic practice which is very much concerned with strategies of teaching and learning. One of us also worked for a while as graphic designer for a small company, also doing other jobs for this firm, as keeping the correspondence and doing small translations from English.
At the end of 2006, we lost h.arta space. In that same period, we received confirmations for residencies and projects that were covering almost entirely the year 2007. So, we resigned our jobs as schoolteachers and graphic designer/contact person and we became “free lancers”. We continue to work like that since then, doing different projects (we had in this period two other temporary h.arta spaces, conceiving and organising the programs for them, and we also did several other projects taking different forms such as publications, workshops, installations, etc). It is an uncertain and instable way of life, without social security and without any possibility to plan ahead (we don’t know for sure from were we will have money next year, and there are also periods of months when we have no income and live on our savings) but we are still able to do that for a while. It is a price that we pay for the possibility to use our own time as we want, doing the things that we are interested in, a price that we pay for a sort of freedom (that is not completely safe from different compromises) but that still allows us to choose the topics to work on and the strategies that we consider relevant.
Ideally, we would manage to diminish our consume practices so much (by analysing our internalised capitalism and by sorting out the real needs from the mere consumerist illusions), that we would be able to live from even less money than we have now. We think about developing our strategies in that direction, not in the direction of getting more money (that means, most of the times, accepting more compromises, compromises such as giving through projects symbolic capital to the very institutions and structures that the projects aim to criticise and to be an alternative to), but instead developing strategies of managing to live with less money. We can have this hope because we are together, we can count on each other’s support and our friendship is a sort of insurance for unexpected hardships.
At the end of 2006, we lost h.arta space. In that same period, we received confirmations for residencies and projects that were covering almost entirely the year 2007. So, we resigned our jobs as schoolteachers and graphic designer/contact person and we became “free lancers”. We continue to work like that since then, doing different projects (we had in this period two other temporary h.arta spaces, conceiving and organising the programs for them, and we also did several other projects taking different forms such as publications, workshops, installations, etc). It is an uncertain and instable way of life, without social security and without any possibility to plan ahead (we don’t know for sure from were we will have money next year, and there are also periods of months when we have no income and live on our savings) but we are still able to do that for a while. It is a price that we pay for the possibility to use our own time as we want, doing the things that we are interested in, a price that we pay for a sort of freedom (that is not completely safe from different compromises) but that still allows us to choose the topics to work on and the strategies that we consider relevant.
Ideally, we would manage to diminish our consume practices so much (by analysing our internalised capitalism and by sorting out the real needs from the mere consumerist illusions), that we would be able to live from even less money than we have now. We think about developing our strategies in that direction, not in the direction of getting more money (that means, most of the times, accepting more compromises, compromises such as giving through projects symbolic capital to the very institutions and structures that the projects aim to criticise and to be an alternative to), but instead developing strategies of managing to live with less money. We can have this hope because we are together, we can count on each other’s support and our friendship is a sort of insurance for unexpected hardships.
15.02.2010
