Albedo - Video 3' 55'' (2015) 

Albedo - Text by Adriana Tranca

The evolution of every individual and every community, by extension, entails the rupture of one’s past and the designing of seemly circumstances for a new beginning, a rebirth.

Ceausescu’s Palace/The People’s House/Palace of the Parliament is the symbol of Romanian communism. That is a commonplace. The artistic expressions haven’t bypassed it in the post-communist era.

The concept takes as a central point this iconic building as the subject of a possible alchemic process. It is to some extent the nigredo phase, a metaphor in analytical psychology, as Roberte H. Hopeke calls it, for the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within. Then comes the redemptive albedo, a state of purification, of washing away of impurities, the ablutio. The melting of the People’s House implies the framing of this cleansing process. The next alchemic state is the ideal, the ever sought for, the rubedo.