Is there a single, direct way to tackle empty weekends and the boring months in a capital city that has slept during the whole summertime?
During a short period of time, from the 23-29 of October, a festival was organized out of a triple participation: Hsia-Fei Chang (Taiwan/France), Jon Mikel Euba (Spain) and Janek Simon (Poland). Following the Re Location Shake encounters in Luxembourg, Vlad Nanca invited and selected a group of artists-friends coming from different backgrounds and offering different attractions and distractions.
A lot of big events and festivals suffer under the grueling problems raised by the overcrowded project lists and their unsatisfied wish to expand into a city-wide web of locations or a vertical scale of multi-floored, large-scale exhibitionism. The need to cover and fill out a supposedly empty territory outweighs the instinct for managerial self-preservation. The pressure for public acts of demonstrative force more often than not ends in exhaustion and immediate loss of interest at the most important moment of all – the time when you, yourself, the organizer, the curator or the artist – can take a step back to see what really happened and what else is there left to do.

Conscious or not, since its beginnings, 2020 was oriented by Vlad Nanca towards proximate needs or immediate ends. It was always trying, at least in principle, to cut down on the need for space, for more visibility and for financial aid. By placing the gallery inside the home, Vlad ended up condensing the production and exhibition place into one single unit, as well as opening up his home for a large group of people labeled as visitors. Lobbying for a portable exhibition was also part of this miniaturization process. In the face of dire needs and nonexistent resources, viable solutions are overlooked for being too simplistic and too easy going. That is why perhaps the pace of mini-galleries following in the steps of the first examples has trickled to a stop.
At other times solution for continuous problems such as getting released and promoted are quickly imitated since they appear as obvious or unique in the way they handle those problems. But we should be concerned more if examples lack imitators not when they do. As a powerful technological trend, miniaturization has managed to attenuate the division of labor. Multi-task division into separate sub-units was again made part of a single independent tool. Miniaturization allowed us to carry around just one such tool at a time. It allowed more control but also isolated its carriers.

The Dis Location nano-festival was again able to show variety and to compete with bigger events hungering for budgets. Huge budgets always getting postponed. The performance at the New Gallery in Bucharest by Hsia-Fei Chang and the other two events by Jon Mikel Euba and Janek Simon each at 2020 Home Gallery show a convergence towards mitigated images and personal attitudes towards mass cultural standards.
All these performances necessitated a minimum of available resources, and by happening one at a time and on different days, they all focused the public’s attention separately and economically.
We always have to take into account the limited and easily dispersed energies of a public with limited amounts of time, attention and interest.

The first of the three events was a performance. Hsia-Fei Chang (Taiwan/France) has performed inside the Galeria Noua. Whether it’s Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Southern mainland China or Japan they all have a peculiar way to build up and promote `the idols'. These idols, as entirely artificial beings are highly controlled entertainment end-products. Generally, they thread on a very narrow path gracing a particular look and music style. Their career depends on keeping up all these necessary conventions. They seem forever blocked in certain postures and prefabricated personas with prefabricated biographies. Hsia-Fei Chang’s performance at Galeria Noua was exhibiting all the trappings of the idol-world and a way out from it. By exchanging and uniting several performances into one, by playing between the live and the play-back; the instant hit of the faceless glamour girl falls apart. The power of the assembly line `idols' is always there; it is strident, mixing refinement with vulgarity, and it shocks you because of the easy way it takes your breath away. It is very hard not to see Hsia-Fei as the traveling Canton pop star, and her wigs, silver shoes, and her purple silks all fit too well…
Maybe that is why so many Bucharest eyes and cameras felt a kind of embarrassed recognition as they watched and clicked, in their own drab and straight-faced postures inside the Gallery.
Hsia-Fei manages to make you pick the pink plastic flowers from under her feet(those lovely attendants Gontz and Cosma), sticking them on her white cut-out guitar that was never meant to play a single disturbing note. She reaches the teeny bopper in you, the screamer and the roadie, makes you feel like the weary, tender-hearted clerk in the karaoke lounge who just came in from his local fetish store. As a constant watcher you want to keep all the props standing, you feel cheated if the magic stops, or if the golden wig falls for the last time, or does it really matter if the country western girl gets mixed up with the Shanghai diva and her fantail?
Hsia-Fei offers you a heavily-perfumed glimpse on the same strange and less than perfect world inhabited by the characters of Perfect Blue (*the famous Japanese animation focusing on the idol industry and its victims).

Jon Mikel Euba’s presentation was special as it was mostly art students who were there to learn about his art. The 2020 home gallery stood as comfortable place for a show case of the Basque artist’s projects. His photography, drawings and video works seem to be speaking about the shaky political and social situation in the Basque Country; however, ‘they do not celebrate fear and don’t encourage the public’s speculative expectations. They insist on the autonomy of their contemplative handicraft of repetition in the same measure as they construct a scenography of latent expectation.’

During the Dis Location night, a motley crew scoring for new art war games invaded the 2020 home Gallery. From a beamer hooked on the ceiling, the magic ray spreads the magic
carpet on the living room floor. Janek Simon from Poland who used to launch cathedral spires into space is preparing a comeback for classic arcade games such as the one programmed and designed by Toshihiro Nishikado in 1978. From its beginnings this classic game dealt with political problems. The initial human figures where swiftly transformed into pixilated, triangular shaped, medusa-like, skull-headed extraterrestrials, so as to hide the body counts and bloody scores.
Bible-belt communities felt terribly insecure after the tender minds of their sons and daughters got hooked on the game, thus loosing their appetite for Sunday school faith games. While coins got inserted, economical effects where to follow, Japan was suffering a countrywide coin shortage and kids in the States where busting the cash machines for small change. Cultural upsurge was to follow.
Conflict areas always meet inside the 2-dimensional space of military maps and game layouts.
Janek Simon unites the old geometric designs of Caucasian and Armenian carpets with the low-resolution abstractness of the Space Invaders. The collector carpet furnishing the ethnic-design, world-cuisine magazine becomes a new shopping item for the homecoming marines and the kid back home. It is the Oriental rug for your portable arcade mosque. Follow the voice of the Joystick prophet.

Stefan Tiron

To see the festival program please check www.2020.ro/dislocation
To see images from Hsia Fei Chang’s performance please click here
To see images from Jon Mikel Euba’s presentation please click here
To see images from Janek Simon’s installation please click here