Unde, Unde? Undeva!
/4
- Where. Where? Somewhere!
- Unde, Unde? Undeva!
- 1997
- video, color, sound
- 50sec
CarbonART was an annual camp for artistic creation initiated by curator and art historian Octavian Esanu while he was director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts in Chisinau, Moldova. The event’s name, derived from the chemical element carbon, suggested to the participating artists a creative concept—that of integrating the natural environment directly into their works—while at the same time pointing towards the ephemeral character that the resulting works were to have. Pavel Brăila's “Unde, unde, undeva?”—one of the first performances he ever staged—was realized for the second edition of CarbonART in 1997. Nature is indeed his frame, but actually serves as a mere background that is played with at the crossroads between unrestrained joy and the absurd. Though at that time he only had very few references from the history of performance art, the artist understood one of its most important characteristics: unrepeatability. Even so, he not only documented it, but created the very idea of endless repetition in the way he edited the video material. R.V.