From the series, The E.U. Eastern Fence.

Dana Popa

“January 2007, Romania joins European Union. 

Five hundred years old village of Ruginesti lies isolated within the hills of the Romanian Carpathians. One hundred and eleven families spin a frozen in time lifestyle, the same way their great-great grandfathers did. Only the elderly and young children remained. Every single household has a relative working abroad. 

Towards east, the EU family runs its frontier with The Republic of Moldova (an ex Soviet country) through the middle of another village. 

Both Romania and USSR who had taken Moldova in 1945, sealed this frontier. For 45 years almost nobody crossed it. There are families who had relatives in the same village, but on the other side of the border and they never saw each other again. 

In 1990, after the first free elections in The Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, tens of thousands of Romanians and Moldavians gathered at the border village to celebrate what they thought will follow, the reunification. The scenes on the bridge were reminding of the fall of the Berlin wall. Since then Romanians looked west, Moldavians chose to stay under the east wing, even more since the Communists ruled the country. Romanians are now confident at the table of the European Union. Moldavians are left behind the fence. ”

From the series, Europeans. Untouched By Communism.

Dana Popa

“Twenty years on after the Romanian ‘revolution’ in December 1989, the heavy grey blocks of flats - the painful communist legacy – are the only apparent element to remain unchanged. 

I met with Romanian youth to see what their lives are like nowadays. 

Connected to the world via internet, with access to the latest news and freedom to travel anywhere in Europe, with possibilities of driving convertible cars in their 20s and study abroad, they can’t imagine a reality that was the long cues for milk and a small portion of meat or petrol for hours to an end in the middle of the night, the small bread ratio one family was entitled to, people disappearing for ever with no trace, the no right to listen to any foreign radio channel or to travel abroad, the everyday censorship, etc. 

They live in a reality that inevitably carries on much from the communist past, moulds onto the bittersweet changes that followed, still, is more and more anchored in the imported Western European culture. Romanian girls would now wear the latest Italian fashion, boys would have the last gadgets appearing on the western market. They all freely apply to the Western Universities’ courses and often party in Ibiza. ”

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“Born in Romania in 1977, Dana Popa is just old enough to remember life under communism. She still has her family bread ration card, hand-written ticks indicating each half-loaf quota per person. She laughs at a hand-tinted photograph of herself as a Young Pioneer, and at memories of the mass spectacles she participated in as a member of the organisation. She also remembers the network of personal contacts that had to be tapped to get salami, and the suspicion that surrounded anyone allowed to travel abroad.

Like many people of her generation, Popa left Romania almost as soon as she could, moving to London in 2001 and going on to study photojournalism at the London College of Communication. But she remains fascinated with her homeland, returning for this project, a study of young Romanians born just before or after the fall of communism. Dressed in fashionable Western clothes and laughing with friends in the street, or hanging out at home playing computer games and putting on make-up, these contemporary Romanian adolescents apparently differ little from their European and North American counterparts. One image shows a young woman who has had breast implants, an increasingly popular procedure in Romania.

Popa is stunned by their opportunities, both material and cultural, and her images have a gentle slightly wistful atmosphere, as if mourning what could have been if she’d been born a little later. But she’s also mistrustful of her subjects’ apparent Westernisation. Although they may look European, their day-to-day existence is still shaped by Eastern Bloc architecture and attitudes, she says, adding “they have no direct memory of communism but they live in a reality that inevitably carries much from the past”.

Her reading is visible in some of her images, in the ageing apartment blocks, “Peoples’ Parks” and factories that form the backdrops to her subjects’ lives. More intimate photographs show the traces of communism that still persist in Romanian culture and people. One portrait shows a mother dying her young daughter’s hair at home, for example, the girl’s head neatly wrapped up in a plastic bag – hair dye and plastic bags were both hard to get hold of in communist Romania, and people got used to improvising. “It becomes clear that the instant translation‚ into another culture, into another way of life and value – and that is what people in Eastern Europe expect to happen – is impossible,” wrote Slavenka Draculic in 1991 in The Trivial is Political, the introduction to How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. “The ‘iron curtains’ will stay with us for a long time: in our memories, in our lives that we cannot renounce, no matter how difficult they were and how hard we try.”

Popa’s images also show that contemporary Romanian identity isn’t just a matter of before or after communism, though. The heavily patterned carpets and rugs in some shots speak of Romania’s Eastern and Ottoman heritage; Orthodox icons reference the schism that divided Europe into East and West more than 1000 years ago. For all their apparent Westernisation young Romanians draw on a long history peculiar to their country, she implies, just as the young Americans and Britons they seek to emulate. In fact Romanian culture is a complex mix of peoples and tribes – the name Romania derives from the Latin for “citizen of Rome” and the region was part of the Roman Empire until the 3^rdcentury. It was then inhabited and ruled by Germanic tribes, Goths, Huns, Slavs, Saxons, Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and wasn’t recognised as an independent state until 1878. Its borders continued to shift until just after the Second World War, when the country reached its current status quo.

Despite this, though, Romanian national identity has existed for at least 500 years – something that was to prove both a blessing and a curse under communism. Soviet troops helped establish the People’s Republic in 1947, but when President Nicolae Ceausescu took power in 1965 his epic national pride gave the country a certain degree of autonomy. Unwilling to toe the Soviet line, Ceausescu ended Romania’s active participation in the Warsaw Pact; he openly condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and resisted Gorbachev-style economic reform in the 1980s.

Ceausescu’s nationalism also brought folly, though, folly that led to misery and poverty for millions. In 1966 he attempted to increase the country’s population to 25 million by banning abortion; women were pushed into backstreet alternatives that became a common cause of death. In 1982 he decided to repay Romania’s foreign debts by banning imports and exporting the nation’s produce; “luxury” items disappeared from the shops and staples such as bread, milk, vegetables and electricity became hard to find. Both policies helped create the orphanages that became infamous in the 1980s, and which still cause controversy now – Romanian children have been political bargaining chips for nearly half a century, so it’s apt that Popa references them again.

Romanian national identity proved Ceausescu’s undoing when violent protests sprang up in Western Romania at the end of 1989. By 18 December a group of protestors was singing nationalist songs while waving a flag with a hole in its centre – a Romanian flag with the communist insignia cut out. This flag became increasingly frequent as the protests turned to revolution and by Christmas Day, Ceausescu and his wife had been executed. Slavoj Zizek has interpreted the hole as signifying the absence of power once the government had been kicked out (in Tarrying with the Negative, 1993); the red, yellow and blue and the gaping hole suggest other readings too, though, such as the ghostly endurance of communism and the continuing strength of Romanian cultural identity.

“Men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in,” wrote W Somerset Maugham in The Razor’s Edge, a quote Popa asked me to think about. “It is all these things that have made them what they are.”

Like Popa, many young Romanians now feel they have to emigrate to progress. Most of her subjects in this project hope to move abroad, and it’s estimated that two million, a tenth of the population, have done so since 1989. Holding onto its youngest, brightest sparks is now one of Romania’s biggest challenges, and it’s a challenge Popa obliquely refers to in her shots of empty parks, abandoned factories and unpeopled streets. Perhaps the hole in the Romanian flag can also be interpreted as a symbol of this absence; perhaps Popa’s project is as much an elegy to the country she left behind as a register of what she missed growing up there.” (from Photomonitor)