”Chronicle of the Announced Collapse” – Bucharest architecture marked by political regimes
“Chronicle of the Announced Collapse” is the exhibition of Vlad Dragne hosted by Galeria Posibilă from June 26 to August 2.
Alienation, the passage of time and the loss of memory are the favorite themes of the young artist, winner of the “Master 2025” program run by the Bucharest gallery. He photographically and multimedia maps the stratification of ideological influences in Bucharest architecture.
Vlad Dragne is finishing this year his master’s program at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Photo-Video department. In high school, he documented the everyday life of his class with a handycam and co-founded the film club B23, still active today. During his undergraduate studies in Film and TV at the University of York, he developed a passion for alternative, analog and historical photographic techniques, eventually building his own photographic equipment. In his practice, he draws from personal experiences and blends mythological and literary elements with visual language from film and video art to explore ways of reconciling the personal and national past with the present, concerned with testimonies of alienation, the passage of time and the loss of memory. He believes that only an intersectional approach can hope to unravel the ambiguity and absurdity of the informational thicket of everyday life.
Fac and fiction
His project tells the story of an inter-war photographer who comes to Bucharest in search of his brother who ran away from home to join the Legionary Movement. But he arrives, with maps, luggage and equipment from the 1920s, in the Bucharest of 2025.
Photographs and excerpts from his diary unwittingly map the political course of the last century. They highlight the ideological stratification of Bucharest’s architecture imposed by the succession of regimes, each preferring to hide or erase the past rather than preserve it. Searching for ways to get closer to his brother, the photographer traverses the decades of monarchy, fascism, communism and savage capitalism through the stories of familiar places: traces of collective forgetting, imposed or unintentional, decorate buildings that many of us pass by every day without paying attention, much like the way dangerous ideologies spread unnoticed.
Vlad Dragne’s exhibition “Chronicle of the Announced Collapse” will be open from Wednesday to Saturday from 16:00 to 20:00 from June 26 to August 2.
