4. razvan botis - sugar / earth / rosy sausage
The exhibition took place on November 1, 2008, at 21.00, within a home gallery set up in a typical block of flats living room. The curator of the exhibition was Stefan Tiron. One day before the opening, Razvan Botis held a public presentation at Paradis Garaj.
"Razvan Botis is from Brasov. He went to university in Cluj. Razvan Botis works with raw materials. Raw matter is not pure, or untouched. It was placed in the service of the Romanian state a long time ago. The national bed-time stories, the political-agrarian legends and the ballads of the national economy use land as raw matter. They exploit, bottle up and sell to the masses the land underneath their feet.
The theory of: "We are not selling our contry!" uses the land in a National-Socialist manner of "Blut und Boden" ("Blood and Land") type, linking inexorably the unaltered land with the unaltered blood.
The infantilization of the masses must go through the progressive sweetening of day to day life. In order to make children shut up, you must give them candy on a stick.
Razvan Botis implements with new materials the neccessary demitization, the welcome entropy of values and the dissolution of sacred symbols by melting, digging, cutting and moulding.
As raw matter, the immemorial proletarian food, the lunch on the building site and the food of the street sweepers best imitates artificial rock. Cheap food accurately reproduces the grain of granite and synthetic basalt of the best quality. Inversely, any monumental mass, any preferred sculpture of triumphant Modernism feeds the hungry masses with a lump of stone." (ST)
The exhibition was made up of two series of objects and a performance. Besides the jars in which he had bottled Romanian soil with the intention to sell it outside the country and the sugar lollipops in the shape of Romania, Razvan Botis also made an ironical reconstruction of the Table of Silence by Brancusi, built from rosy sausage and cremwurst.
The objects were distributed towards two public segments. Half of the exhibits were given to those attending the opening through a tombola procedure. Because of the limited space, access was invitation based only.
The other half were distributed using the same method to those who sent an email at - mirceanicolaeee[at]yahoo.com, via feeder.ro. There were five participants competing for seven sets of objects. They were all declared winners.
