Tuesday, 15. 12. 2009 – Semperdepot, M1 – open to general public

18:00 Work presentation: “Soul of Sustainability” by Irina Gheorghe, Alina Popa, Stefan Tiron (Bucharest)

Soul of Sustainability While in Vienna as artists-in-residence we focused on the concept of sustainability, as part of the main discourse of KulturKontakt and other similar cultural organizations. The prevalence of this new term relies on the fact that art and culture are seen as indispensable though until recently disregarded instruments in the larger policy of sustainable development. But what does sustainable development actually sustain? The Bureau of Melodramatic Research has spotted how its very own object of study - emotion, sensitivity, pathos – is instrumentalized with the purpose of saving the soul of sustainability (“Sustainability also needs a soul”, Dr. Hildegard Kurt, from “Art as Seismograph”, KulturKontakt Magazine, Autumn, 2009).

Artists regarded as bearers of subjectivity are the main “agents of the soul”, the missing link in a self-contained chain of sustainability in search of a “heart”. Sustainability is identified as a new imposed standard for sustaining and maintaining the power of capital owners.

Irina Gheorghe & Alina Popa founded in 2009 an independent institution The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, in Bucharest, Romania. BMR is a non-profit organization with the general aim of cooperation with institutions from the cultural field in order to reveal the circuit of the sentimental capital which determines social, politic and ultimately economic relations. The Bureau conducts critical analysis by detecting melodramatized appropriations and reappropriations. Its melodramatic methodology is defined as melocritique. Currently they are artists-in-residence at the KulturKontakt Vienna.

Stefan Tiron lives and works in Bucharest, Romania as an independent curator. In 2005 artist in residence with monochrom in Vienna. He indulges in his recent hobby for the cultural and ideological ramification of apiculture, beehive metaphors, social insects and social engineering.