Jazz, a “cultural weapon” in socialist Europe – Multimedia exhibition at /SAC Berthelot
Twenty artists and groups of artists are brought together in the multimedia exhibition “Here we see jazz”, opened on the evening of December 14 at /SAC Berthelot, where it can be visited until January 24. The curators are Paul Breazu, Mihai Lukács and Alex Radu.
Bucharest had jazz before it had spaces to host it. It had improvised studios, altered frequencies, rehearsals with the lights off, listeners who instinctively understood that freedom circulated in rhythms other than those allowed. In the exhibition “Here’s Where Jazz is Seen”, the Sound Archive traces precisely these trails: how jazz negotiated order, time and the body in a society built on control, and how that memory can be put back in motion today.
Arhiva de Sunet, the Romanian sound memory research and recovery platform coordinated by Paul Breazu and Mihai Lukács, presents at /SAC Berthelot an exhibition that investigates the circulation of jazz in Bucharest before 1990 and the contemporary ways of listening, visualizing, performing and artistically relating to its sound and ideas.
Program of events
December 14, 17:00 – opening
December 17, 19:00 – Performance Katia Pascariu – Agent J: Jazz for Freedom
December 19, 19:00 – Radio Show Mihai Iordache // Ligia Keșișan poetry performance
December 20, 19:00 – Performance Simona Dabija – Beware of Satchmo // Performance poetry Elena Vlădăreanu // Performance poetry Ionel Ciupureanu
A visual and sound laboratory
The exhibition does not propose the display of classical archives, but outlines a space where documents, voices and images are activated live. At its center is the Sound Archive Studio, a functional installation configured as a radio booth that will host discussions and performative interventions about the local jazz scene under communism, with guests who lived, documented or theorized this history.
Radio becomes a curatorial method: a way of introducing into the exhibition voices missing from the archives, informal memories, tensions and collaborations between music and socio-political space. The broadcasts are public and part of the exhibition infrastructure. The full program of these radio shows will be announced soon.
Jazz as a critical gesture
On 17 December, the exhibition presents “Agent J: Jazz for Freedom”, a one-woman show with Katia Pascariu, conceived by Mihai Lukács and inspired by CIA and Radio Free Europe archives. The performance examines how jazz was used as a “cultural weapon” in socialist Europe: Katia Pascariu switches between the role of CIA agent and improvising musician, converting documents, jazz fragments and propaganda speeches into a stage story about clandestine listening and freedom as continuous improvisation.
In “Beware of Satchmo”, the performance that can be seen on December 20, Simona Dabija reinterprets, breaks and continues a solo built on East End Blues, one of the first great improvisations in jazz history. The performance revisits Louis Armstrong’s four concerts in Romania (1965) and their impact on the local imaginary, starting from an analysis of Free Europe. The body here becomes a tool of critical translation, a way of reconstructing the circulation of jazz in Bucharest in those years.
Poetry adds another kind of rhythm to the exhibition. Elena Vlădăreanu, Ligia Keșișian and Ionel Ciupureanu propose performative interventions that function as interludes and counterpoints, bringing verse closer to the principles of improvisation: variation, rupture, return.
A visual jam session
The works in the exhibition activate concerns for (and the relationship between) memory, time, rhythm, gesture, sound experiment and their perception/representations. From urban trails and polyphonic structures, to critical interventions by invited artists, the exhibition functions as a visual jam session – with no single direction, no linear history.
The exhibition brings together works by the artists 111invers1, Apparatus 22, Justin Baroncea & Cristian Matei, Ion Bîrlădeanu, Răzvan Botiș, Gigi Căciuleanu, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Nicolae Comănescu, Iulian Cristea, Roberta Curcă, Andrei Dinescu, Cosmin Frunteș, Dimitrie Luca Gora, Dumitru Gorzo, Iosif Kiraly, NOIMA, Oana Maria Pop, Miriam Răducanu, Ramon Sadîc.
