A photography book edited by the author herself together with Cibrán Rico and Suso Vázquez Gómez and published by Fabulatorio in collaboration with La Kursala – University of Granada to accompany the exhibition `Ostalgia´, held at the gallery Kursala from April 30 to June 30, 2013 […]: “Nobody could trust anybody,” are the words my father, Teodor Kurz, often uses to describe the atmosphere that permeated day-to-day life in the Socialist Republic of Romania (SRR). Yet his photographs, taken in the Romania of the 1970s and 1980s, transmit something different from mistrust, something that could even be taken for happiness. Warm and colorful, they show people who seem to live a life of welfare. These fragments of life that I have subtracted from my father’s archives (and from my biography), interrupt the monotonous rhythm with which Ostalgia runs. Which of these two rhythms is noise and which is music? Were we really happy, Dad? Or rather, have we all played a massive fiction of welfare? Can you be happy without freedom? Are there fulfilled private lives in the absence of public life? Can a person be happy even if she knows she is surrounded by limits, lies and menaces? What would I have been if the Romanian revolution did not happen and I kept on living in a closed system? Could I be happy then? Do I miss living in the SRR? Do we miss the USSR?”
Awards: Best National Photobook, PHotoEspaña 2014; D&AD Award In Book Award, Entire Books (Design and Art Direction Awards), London, 2014; Top Ten Photobooks ICP (International Center of Photography) New York, 2014.
The 2 editions of the book were a fast sold out, but a PDF can be downloaded here for free.
Editors: Simona Rota, Cibrán Rico López & Suso Vázquez Gómez; Designed by: desescribir (desescribir.com)
Texts: Simona Rota, Teodor Kurz
Video: describir; Filmed at: Galicia Editorial, A Coruña, 2013
Acknowledgements: Jesús Micó, Dietmar Steiner, Ángel Borrego Cubero, Luis Díaz Díaz, Galicia Editorial Staff, Daniel González Portela.