On Thursday, October 8, 2009, at 16.00, exhibition number 11 from the Young Romanian Art series will be opened in the New Gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, Italy. The exhibition is entitled 'home alone', and it brings together objects and texts that were created as a result of the interaction between the public and Lorgean Theater, imagined and organized by Jean-Lorin Sterian in his own apartment.
The play starts when you receive a phone call. You get an address, a date and hour when you have to be there. Then you go into the elevator after having received a ticket in exchange for the object you have brought with you. In your world, this is a symbol of loneliness.
Then you sit down among people you don’t know, in the dark. Lorin plays some music on the mp3 and then a monologue follows. Some people sit on a chair and say some things. They speak the language of the street, the dramatic approach is different from the first to the next. Stories are being told, conversations on yahoo messenger are read. You start to feel that everything is part of the play. Even the hesitations and accidents, even the lamp at the back of the chair which is the only light in the room.
At the end you also have to say something. You brought an object with you and now it is the time to say what the connection with loneliness is. Against your will, you start to make a confession, you are being listened to and you listen to others. In a few days Lorin will write to you asking to send him a small text in which you have to tell the story again. Your story and the object will both go into an exhibition.
A series of shows inside a theater built in one’s own apartment and an exhibition of objects and texts can be in fact part of a social game. If your presence as public at the play is part of a preconceived plan that will turn you into a participant in the show, then there is a conceptual framework in which you have been included, even against your will.
You are the victim of a creator of situations who will make you understand that all day-to-day behavior can be transformed or seen as theater. Then, after you will see the objects and read the texts you might begin to smile, because loneliness is not so bleak as it seems to us all when we are in distress.
To feel alone becomes being alone, without any negative charge. And maybe then the play is over, as its therapeutic function is attained.
Young Romanian Art is Mircea Nicolae's residency project at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice, during which the artist functions as an organizer and a curator. This series of one-week exhibitions aims at promoting young Romanian art during the Venice Art Biennial 2009.
