About Fabrica de Pensule as a new "class project"...and more!

At the Fabrica de Pensule there was an exposition about laborers and their work.

The object of focus of the photographer was the cupboard of a worker filled with erotic pictures, as well as the walls of most parts of the factorys “backstages”. It was all set up as if the workers were an extinct civilization (observation made by Ştefan Tiron), of which only these mysterious traces remain, that allow us to detect, to gues and decipher what this “culture” meant: a bunch of men who created themselves imaginary porn sanctuaries in which they could envision voluptuous women they couldn’t have. You could envision a middle class read the exposition could arouse civilizing scenarios and fantesies about pedagogical programes in which this erotic animal might be disciplined. This impression came from the fact that the artist shot pictures of factories as they looked after they were closed down, abandoned as soon as they stoped production. Signs of life were caught on camera, as they appealed to the bohemian artist that comes with his clichés and stereotypes to capture moments. This approach is deeply problematic not only because it turns the poor worker into a libido driven strange creature that let’s go and hides his erotic dreams in the dusty iron cupboards of the factory- and in conclusion, into someone who cannot be taken seriously. It’s problematic especially because the worker is turned into a distant object, set out of context, out of the place that shapes him as a subject.


The old factories are very under-used, as in their infrastructure. Those not abandoned, are used as office areas for service firms, small warehouses, or workshops for small production firms. And the deindustrialization brings not only the devalueation of these areas and spaces, it brings the devalueation of the lives of the people working here. If the great industry in the time of Ceauşescu meant the massive presence of the rural immigrant worker as a workforce, now the logic of the industrial space with the much smaller firms make the presence of the worker invisible and the remaining industry became an activity that is eventually recognized only in numbers.

The FP is linked to the market logic and the devalueation of industrial spaces. The very small rent per surface was clearly a very important part of creating an artistic center in the periphery of a city that culturally capitalizes its historical center. But it’s hard not to notice a structural homology between the idea of art that refuses the tie, the bowler, intellectual weight, the mannerd bourgeois gestures and the spaces that were denied a legitimate urban history. There is a similitude of position between the artist that experiments with the incomplete, the partial, in process and the devalued, the unattended, the shriveled, the small and pety lives of the workers, the “little history”. This allows the confidence to assume with nonchalance the name Fabrica de Pensule and every connotation that comes with this label attached to a contemporary arts center.

Obviously this value-encouraging process of the small and incomplete in the art circuits and cultural consumeing is not an innocent process with a salvatory on its own. It is basically a “class project”, but one that is defined in other parameters, not with a bow-tie, but with a scarf, not with a suit, but with a colored vintage coat. It is a project of a fraction of a middle class, for which culture is a natural aspect of everyday life. Culture doesn’t occupy a special moment, isolated through rituals of sophisticated consumerism, in which the suit makes the difference between before and after the act of culture.

The production and the consume of semnifications is a normal way of being, that doesn’t need the whole production of hemogenic and strength-wise destinctions. You don’t need civilisatory gestures that signal the essential difference between you as an art consumer and the uneducated worker. But it remains to be seen if art is able to assume the neighbourhood it is situated in, the “little history” and unsophisticated- but not in the way that art may be for the workers. Also remains to be seen if it will be able to tighten the circle with the history of the peasent class, the worker, the subordinate, in a way that between all these, nothing distant remains, a dead body that we study with sympathy, but with a tweezer, in the lab, with gloves. It’s clear that there are lost moments, but it’s also obvious that these create debates, the courage to stand ones ground, the ability to reflect. Anyway, time will tell if the new “class project” and cultural production will search for new distinctions of power, or on the contrary, we’ll have an art that wants to emancipate itself, to create instable and strange alliances. We hope it will be able to produce an art as a meeting place, as opposed to a place of distance, and undefeatable differences.