neon sign, 460×50 cm, 2013
The phrase belongs to no one and belongs to everyone; it has been spoken at tables, on train stations and in marketplaces, uttered with an unmistakable blend of gentle reproach and resignation.
Placed on the façade of a building steeped in history, it ceases to be a private sigh and becomes a public declaration, almost involuntary.
Neon letters reclaimed from the visual vocabulary of the ‘80s, from the advertisements that lit up cities where everything else was dark. That neon didn’t merely decorate, but announced. Now it announces once more – not a product, not a service, but a collective feeling without an author or a date.
What makes this phrase irrefutable in conversation also makes it on the wall. It doesn’t claim that things were better. It simply says that they were different.
It’s a retreat from any debate. Impossible to refute, impossible to fully confirm.
Nostalgia acts as a shield, not as an argument, and that is precisely why it cuts deeper than any argument.
The building is not a neutral medium, it is a co-author of the work. The building and the current advertisement on it simultaneously contradict and confirm the illuminated phrase above.
The passerby who stops sees two overlapping moments: the one from which the light comes and the one in which he now stands, looking.
The work does not take a stance; it merely places a phrase where it already existed, unwritten.
Made in the frame of the Waiting Spaces project, manufactured by Mr Bebe.
Hosted voluntarily by a friend’s parents on their balcony for two weeks in Piața Mărăști, Timișoara.
The piece was displayed three more times in Timișoara: on the balcony of a public institution (as part of the Annual architecture event, 2014), in front of a former industrial building transformed into a cultural venue (Ambasada, 2016), and on the façade of the Memorial of the Revolution of 1989 (as part of the exhibition Mad(e) in Romania), from where it disappeared…
