Maria Crista
The way we live in a better world: on a work by Cezar Lazarescu

What can one see from Romania?
Until not long ago, in civilized Europe there lived the other.
Civilized Europe was somewhere in the west, free, democratic, tolerant and fair. Not the discussion about the myths between east and west is the most important here, but the one about the projects and realities of these worlds, about the ways in which societies build their reality/ history and about their capacity to notice the signs of failure. The project "France 05" of Cezar Lazarescu is not only about France, it makes me think of the better world we want to live in.
Using press images, from the time of protests in November 2005, Cezar Lazarescu records a moment of visibility for the people who are ignored. However, not the moments in themselves, when these people express their pain and anger towards the unjust world they live in, are raising in us anxiety, but all those things that caused them and which at a closer inspection become shrilling. Such things are the statistics published by Reuters immediately after the protests, which say that one of three French people declares oneself a racist. What exactly makes people act and be in a certain way? It's as if memory is always too fragile in the world that is born again with each generation.
In spite of the knowledge which seems to be more and more accessible, in spite of the fact that the traumas of humanity are so much present, people prefer to build their self-confidence on the hatred towards the other.
In the ghetto there lives, usually, "the most other" who is not equal with you because (s)he is always different and has always less chances. But where does the reality of the ghetto start? How many times do we ask ourselves how much power we have and what do we do with it? The physical space is first a symbolic space. What we imagine and what we believe often becomes part of reality, like a construction which before existing as such, appears first as a project.
Cezar's work is a sign, a sign about the ghetto, which essentially tells a story about a failed project (and which makes one ask: what need to center the world on themselves makes people say that the other is so different and so unimportant?)

Maria Crista

Cezar Lazarescu is an artist living and working in Iasi.
Maria Crista is an artist, member of H.arta group, based in Timisoara.