Relying on oral and fragmentary histories, I AM ALSO PART OF THE THREE TURNS traces the effects of a destructive earthquake in Bucharest and a concurrent flood it caused in a small town in Buzău, during a period of nationalistic urbanization in Communist Romania. In the capital, the destruction was seized as an opportunity by the authoritarian government to further raze large swaths of the city, invoking the earthquake as a mythological force in order to strategically replace rubble with new Soviet-bloc housing projects.
In a small town near Buzău, a woman tells a story she knows all too well, with the feeling of a parable — or a bad joke. Fifty years ago, she sold her cow to buy a sofa, which was eventually swept away by the floods. Staged by the filmmaker in a series of domestic geometries — turkeys walking in groups, the curious glances of knick-knacks, flowers lined up in the sun — the story of the woman, the family, this (still) small, detailed, and well-controlled world is confronted with the indistinct landscapes of a recent flood and archival material concerning Romania’s floods of 1970s, the devastating earthquake of 1977, and the systematic destruction of urban heritage during late communism. Thus, I AM ALSO PART OF THE THREE TURNS articulates a discourse that is serious in tone and playful in form about the nature and the culture behind the idea of tabula rasa. (Călin Boto)
Monica Maria Moraru is a visual artist and filmmaker whose works seek sensorial and cinematic resonances across a patchwork of temporal, relational and political histories. Relying equally on personal mythologies, oral histories, and narrative reimaginings, her practice culminates in sculpture, video, moving image and sound installations, engaging the political considerations of image-making through material ligatures and poetics. Her work has been presented in exhibitions including Centre CLARK D’art et Diffusions (Montreal), Rupert (Vilnius), Bunker 2 (Toronto), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), and screened internationally at European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück), Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Diffusions (Toronto), Stuttgart Filmwinter, London Shorts Film Festival, among others.
