[spectre] Tranzit House, Cluj, Romania

[Nina Czegledy]

Hello All,

I have been on this list and its former Syndicate
percursor from the very beginning and have
been always interested in the various exchanges,
interviews, reports, contributing occasionally my
own dispatch.

Over this summer, I have been deeply impressed
by new, alternative cultural initiatives in the
Middle of Europe. While the profile and focus of
these cultural ventures vary from place to
place, all of them were self or grass roots
initiated and became quickly successful indicating
a need for diverse, often spontaneous and in many
cases informal interaction.

The following four interviews (posted in sections)
are part of a study in progress and concern
Tranzit House, Cluj, Romania; Buryzone,
Bratislava, Slovakia; Kuda org. Novi Sad, Serbia
and Two Artists Two Curators, Budapest, Hungary.

nina czegledy

TRANZIT HOUSE, Cluj, Romania.
http://www.dntcj.ro/NGOs/tranzit

In 1997, Tranzit House, began operations in a former Synagogue in Cluj,
Romania. The dilapidated building has served as a storage place for several
years and could be accessed only through a back alley  Back in the late
nineties, it would have been difficult to foresee the current extent of
activities in the renovated building. The Foundation itself has been
established in 1998. Events began sporadically as early as 1997, however
due to the condition of the building regular programming was not possible
until 2001. The events ranged from folk dancing for children to
experimental film projections. Within this time frame - said Csilla
Konczei, founding member-  the programming allowed the assessment of the
cultural atmosphere of the city, which in turn was reflected in the order
of the events. Over the last year in collaboration with individuals,
especially Joanne Richardson and organizations such as the IDEA Foundation
new trends emerged in programming.

Between September 26-29, 2002, Tranzindex Media Theory Symposium, the
latest collaborative project of the Foundation was held in the Tranzit
House.

This interview with Csilla Konczei and Tincuta Parv coordinator of the
Tranzindex Media Theory Symposium was conducted by e-mail over the summer
and on September 29,2002 in Cluj.

Csilla Konczei, anthropologist, artist and curator worked most of her life
in Cluj.  Csilla is teaching in the Department of Ethnography and
Anthropology at the University of Cluj and she is also involved in
non-verbal communication research. In the former political regime she
couldn't get a job and has been working as a freelance ethnographer. In
1990 she began to work at Romanian National Television.Around this time she
started to produce independent video art, which has been shown at many
international festivals and has received prestigious festival awards.

Tincuta  Parv has graduated from the Art Academy of Cluj in 1998. She has
completed one year of post graduate studies at Nantes, France. Following
this she has obtained another degree in cultural anthropology in Cluj.
Tincuta has been working full-time at Tranzit House for the last two years.


Nina Czegledy: You have initiated the Tranzit project a few years ago. Can
you tell me about the background in Cluj in general and your project in
particular? How and why did this initiative become a reality?

Csilla Konczei: When I started the Tranzit project, Cluj was a sort of a
depressing place. This was the second depressing period in my life -the
first being of course during the Ceausescu regime. Many interesting people
left the country; the intellectual/artistic life has being vegetating in a
very closed and static institutional system. I did not find a satisfying
context for my activities at home. The empty building of a former synagogue
on the bank of Somes River presented a very inspiring apropos for
initiating an artistic and community building project. So we rented the
building from the Jewish community together with my husband and I started
to look for people with whom to develop the project of establishing a
contemporary art center.

By now, Cluj is a much more lively place - maybe in a certain way Tranzit
contributes to this as well .Our project means a permanent activity
facilitated by a small staff and many visiting local and international
artists in the partly restored building of Tranzit House, as we call it.
During the five years of our existence we succeeded to attract artists and
increasing grant support by organizing artistic manifestations, which
expressed our ideas and revealed the possibilities of the project. We could
say that the Tranzit project is a specific low budget project, which
gradually succeeded to transform non-monetary values into monetary ones.

NC: I have been very impressed by the events you organize. Can you describe
your activities and aims?

CK: Maybe a clue for our progress can be found in the freedom integrated
into the concept of Tranzit, which is based on transgression of boundaries.
More concretely: Tranzit Foundation in the first years organized a few
major artistic events to show this direction (We and They, 11-13 October
1997, The Passer-bye, 1998, New Meeting Places, 1999). This was
accomplished parallel to establishing the infrastructure for basic
utilities (water, electricity, gas), and restoration of the building. So
when the space of Tranzit House became functional in 2001 February,
complete with a heating system, plenty of offers were received from groups
and individuals. Beside our own projects, now Tranzit House functions as a
host for very different artistic activities. We came to a period in which
there is a need of a stricter planning, so we have to decide our
priorities, on which major Tranzit projects to focus and how to use the
space of the house for others' activities. In the future, we will probably
keep a few major events, like Tranzit Days festival in the period of
May-June, or an annual conference on media criticism in September, and some
other projects concerning informal education, intercultural activities, the
representation of Jewish culture, and so on. Turning to a more strict
planning is also an economic necessity, as we are totally self-sustained, a
fact that hopefully will not seriously affect the freedom of the house and
of the activities.

NC: The wide range of audiences coming to your events are also impressive.
Can you tell more about your audience?

CK: Talking about our audiences, we should really speak about our audiences
in plural, as there is a real diversity concerning the public of different
events. Although the majority of our public is composed by young people,
especially students - which is a local and regional phenomena -, we can
mobilize different ethnic, age and social groups due to the diversity of
our program. We have projects working with Romani people (artistic
education for children, experimental theatre), we organize programs
concerning Jewish culture inviting the local Jewish community (these are
basically elderly people). The inhabitants of the city got used to the idea
that different social and ethnic groups use the same space, but still the
number of occasions when events of different profiles are mixed are not
very numerous.

NC: What are your plans for the future?

CK: Concerning the future, five years of existence have passed which means
that we could build on the image of a permanent place and organization. The
economic difficulties make it extremely difficult to sustain this image in
reality. We are expanding in many ways:  we continue to restore the
building, we have more permanent collaborators, more success with
applications and projects -and a consequence we have an  increasing budget
and increasingly important art projects. We are trying to seek solutions
for self-raised resources, for example running a caf=E9 and offering cultura=
l
services in order to maintain our independence.

***

The Tranzindex Media Theory Symposium, organized by the Tranzit Foundation
and Joanne Richardson in collaboration with Next 5 Minutes (Amsterdam),
Idea Foundation and ANO Foundation, was held  in Cluj. "The project aimed
at strengthening a critical and active approach towards new visual media
both at a professional level and in the public opinion by launching a
debate on the content of media representation....The stated purpose of the
conference was to find alternatives to existing models of media content, to
evaluate already implemented alternative strategies elsewhere, to adapt
these strategies to local social contexts and to consider visual media as a
channel for communication and community building. More than twenty
participants came from 13 countries - in addition the Kultiplex and Tilos
Radio from Budapest brought 30 members to Cluj.

I have asked Tincuta Parv, project coordinator to tell me more about the
symposium.


NC: Can you tell me about the Tranzindex Symposium?

Tincuta Parv: This is the second edition of Tranzindex - up till now, the
largest media theory event in Cluj. Censorship was the subject of the first
conference last year and it focused on censorship in the arts and cultural
systems. Some media representatives and journalists were also involved. We
tried to focus on independent media, radio, tv  and new media tools such as
the internet. We tried to establish the background in Romania. In the
course of our work, it became obvious that there is still a lack of
connection between the various elements of what could create a real
mediascape. Part of the difficulty is that the commercial sector is very
strong and there is a shortage of independent initiatives. For example
regarding the internet while there have been computers and online
connections as far back as twelve years ago, independent possibilities
became available only lately. There are very big discrepancies between
those who have access and those who don't. This represents partly a
generation gap - young people have a better understanding of computer
related issues. I should add that today there are many internet cafes in
Cluj, however this does no mean that the users have a critical approach.
The customers use these places mostly for entertainment. We intended to
provoke the locals into looking into and to push them into openly
discussing these issues. This was the most important reason to initiate the
conference. At the same time we see ourselves as a cultural center and we
tried to make connections in a wider European context. We developed
different subjects for the conference, such as education in new media,
alternative media issues and questions pertaining as to what is the public
domain, what is a private domain? What is the frontier between documentary
and fiction? How can this be manipulated? We worked on developing the
conference with Joanna Richardson, who is involved in a large global network
of media activists. We combine dour own connections with hers in order
to create a much wide media scene.

NC. I was missing a larger local audience at Tranzindex. Can you talk about
this?

TP: We organize an eclectic range of events here in Tranzit - people are
used to come to those events which are well advertised in the Romanian
press. For example when we organized the Tranzit Days festival, there were
some important theatre groups coming from Bucharest as well as an important
group of Slovenian artists. Although we made the same publicity for the
events, most of the people came only for the Romanian events, because they
knew of these people through an informal information network. In the future
we have to consider this informal network when we wish to spread
information on upcoming events.