COURAGE

connecting collections

Teodora and her sister Boryana, daughters of Sevdalina and Panayot Panayotov, grew up in an environment of intellectuals-teacher, highly critical to the Communist regime. Born in Sofia, they lived also in Chepelare, where their mother was a teacher, and their father director of “Vassil Dechev” Secondary High School.

Teodora Panayotova graduated from Sofia University with Master Degree in Philology and Higher Education. She worked as a lecturer at the Institute for Foreign Students in Sofia; she participated in the informal movements of the 1980s; was co-founder of the teachers and the journalists trade union “Podkrepa”. Actively supporting the political change to democracy, since 10 November 1989, Teodora Panayotova has been working in the oppositional newspapers Reporters 7, Podkrepa and Democracy. She also became member of the the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF): a broad coalition established in December 1989 by a group of non-governmental organizations and restored parties from the period prior to the establishment of the communist regime.

Since their childhood, Teodora and her sister Boryana witnessed the activity of their mother, "who has always provoked the disapproval of the socialist power. As a teacher, screenwriter and theater director, Sevdalina Panayotova, for half of a century, created scenarios and plays that were stopped and obstructed by the institutions, but which raised generations of courage, civic position, activity and anti-communist thinking."

Teodora explains her anticommunist beliefs by the characteristics of the totalitarian regime: "To enforce and to survive, the regime systematically and purposefully destroyed the basic moral norms and transformed the amoral behavior into normality: murder, lawlessness, betrayal, slander, lying, duplicity, falsification, corruption etc. At the same time, the regime held the population subject to fear and terror, which turned paranoia into a constantly mental state, destroying trust among people. And trust is the foundation of every society."

Having beeing parent herself in non-fear and non-obedience, Teodora Panayotova maintains that "the claim that there was no resistance in Bulgaria against the communist regime, comparing it with the 1956 Hungarian uprising, the Czech 1968 revolution and the Polish resistance 1981, is not true. In the first years after 9.IX.1944 there was the so-called Goryanstvo movement. These were militarized bands who fought against the communist regime and who were killed in very cruel way. Periodically in Bulgaria there were groups and individuals who have been against the communist regime, and who therefore spend years in forced labour camps or in prisons, or have been objects of dismissal, interrogations and other repressive measures; or forced to emigrate. One such group was also around Sevdalina Panayotova, whose collection we are presenting."

Her understanding of cultural opposition Teodora Panayotova expresses as follows: "Cultural opposition is an opposition through the means of culture in the narrow sense of the word, i.e. through the forms of art (verbal and non-verbal, of written and oral speech, which includes education). During the 45 years of socialist Bulgaria there was a cultural opposition, which is less expressed in works (written, paintings, sculptures, theatrical and musical) directed openly against the totalitarian power, but more in getting out from the established interpretation of works and breaking the pattern of socialist realism."

Andrei Pandele (b. 27 August 1945, Bucharest) is an architect, urbanist, and photographer. He graduated from the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in 1968. His professional portfolio in the field of architecture and urbanism includes a number of outstanding achievements. Among these may be mentioned: a five-star hotel in the Danube Delta; a solar dwelling in Sector 2 of Bucharest; the Ambrose Paré pavilion in La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, Île-de-France; remodelling and fitting of nineteenth-century buildings on Calea Rahovei and Calea Victoriei in Bucharest; and a sixteen-level hotel on a steep (85%) slope at Băile Herculane. In 2000, he was strategy coordinator for the General Urbanistic Plan of the Romanian Capital, Bucharest.

Andrei Pandele has a prodigious photographic activity, being a member of the (Romanian) Association of Artist Photographers since 1973 and of the Fédération Internationale de l’Art Photographique since 1981, a founder member of the (Romanian) Sports Press Association in 1990, and a collaborator for Associated Press and Sygma in the same year. He has had photographs published in various foreign magazines, including Photo, Sovetskoe Foto, Fotografie, Lettres de Paris, Midi Olympique, Rugby World & Post, and in such Romanian publications as Arhitectura, Sportul, Fotografia, and the newspapers Adevărul, Cotidianul, and Evenimentul zilei. He has also had occasional university teaching activity, teaching courses on photography and architecture at the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism. His photographs illustrated the volume Vom muri şi vom fi liberi (We will die and we will be free, 1990) by Irina Nicolau. He has published the greater part of his photographs in various albums and illustrated volumes, such as Fotografii interzise şi imagini personale (Forbidden photographs and personal images, 2007), Martorul-surpriză: Fotografii necenzurate din comunism (Surprise witness: The uncensored photographs of communism, 2008), Casa Poporului: Un sfârşit în marmură (The House of the People: An end in marble, 2009); and Bucureștiul mutilat (Mutilated Bucharest, 2018).

As a photograph, Andrei Pandele has an impressive portfolio. He has had numerous exhibitions of photographs all over the world, and some of his works have entered international private collections. Among exhibitions in Romania may be mentioned: “Fotografii interzise și imagini personale,” (Forbidden photographs and personal images) National Theatre, December 2007 to March 2008; “Amintiri din Epoca de Aur,” (Memories of the Golden Age) Cinema Studio, Bucharest, at the premiere of the film of the same name, September 2009; “Made in Romania,” Sala Dalles, October 2009; “Andrei Pandele la TIFF,” (Andrei Pandele at the Transylvania International Film Festival) Museum of Art, Cluj, May 2010; and ”Veșnicia s-a născut la sat,” (Eternity was born in the village) Museum of the Romanian Peasant, București, January 2015. He has had solo or group exhibitions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Israel. Articles about his photographs have appeared in numerous national and international publications. Out of all of them, Andrei Pandele considers that the article “A lost city: Photos of Bucharest's past,” published by BBC News, is the most important reference to his photographic work. Andrei Pandele keeps a blog, where a number of his photographs of everyday life during communism and of the demolitions in Bucharest in the last communist decade can be found. Address: http://www.ap-arte.ro/

Zoran Pantelić, born in 1966 in Novi Sad, where he still lives and works, is an independent visual artist. He studied sculpture at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad and, in line with the education system of the day, his early period was determined by the traditional visual arts scene. He has had solo and group exhibitions, and has participated in contemporary art conferences. 

His work changed during the 1990s for a number of reasons. On the local level the country was at war, on the global level a transformation was underway towards embracing new technologies. In his own words “this new environment led me to question my acquired knowledge and in relation to that and the economic crisis in Serbia, I saw the strengthening of my personal feelings and relationship toward immaterial art as my initiation, precisely through the local neo-avantgarde and avantgarde.”

He was active in the Apsolutno art collective from its inception in 1993 until 2005. The collective focused on new technologies, traditional art projects and video installations. In the second half of the 1990s, through artist residencies abroad, he acquired an insight into international events and contemporary social and cultural challenges in Europe. The political shift on 5 October 2000 – when the presidency of Slobodan Milošević was ended by mass demonstrations of Democratic Opposition of Serbia supporters – pointed to the needs and problems in art production that reacts to and yet is not rooted in the infrastructure and politics of culture, where it could interface with societal relations.

After acquiring experience abroad and learning about organizational models, in 2001, together with other members, he established New Media Center_kuda.org with a space with permanent infrastructure, where people could gather, share ideas and information and collaborate. This became the basis for new artistic production, a hub, an archive and a library. The mission of kuda.org is to organize artist-activists who challenge the use of new technologies in art and society and to create a platform for the critical analysis of technology and society.

Žarana Papić was born on July 4, 1949 in Sarajevo and was a Yugoslav sociologist/anthropologist, professor, co-founder of the feminist movement in Yugoslavia and co-founder of the Belgrade Center for Women’s Studies (1992).

Žarana Papić is remembered as one of the pioneers of Yugoslav feminism. She set high standards in theory and in activism, struggling for a more equal and fairer society.

As a trained sociologist, Žarana first encountered contemporary feminist theory at the Croatian Sociological Society conference in Portorož in 1976. In the same year, she attended the first course of Women’s Studies organized at the Inter-University Center Dubrovnik. Together with other colleagues, she organized the first international feminist conference in Eastern Europe in October 1978 in Belgrade’s Student Cultural Center (SKC). At this conference feminists from countries like England, Germany, France and Poland were invited for the first time, which also provided the opportunity for exchange with Yugoslav feminists.

The conference was titled: Drug-ca žensko pitanje, novi pristup? [Comrade woman. Women’s question- A new approach?] This conference represented a new feminist movement and theory, which was driven by hosting renowned participants from around Europe. The conference critically examined the dominant patriarchic system, and enabled the founding of a group of feminist-oriented theoreticians and activists in Yugoslavia. The conference signaled the beginning of a feminist critique of patriarchy in socialism.

Starting in 1977, Žarana Papić published articles on the subject of women’s issues. Together with Lydia Sklevicky from Zagreb, she edited the book Antropologija žene [Anthropology of Women] (1983), the first of its kind in Yugoslavia. The book inspired many young women to engage with this topic. In 1989, Žarana became an assistant in social anthropology at the Department of Sociology. She completed her doctorate degree with the thesis: “Dijalektika pola i roda - priroda i kultura u savremenoj socijalnoj antropologiji” [The dialectics of sex and gender - nature and culture in contemporary social anthropology] and earned the position of assistant professor at the same department. Žarana regularly taught social and cultural anthropology and gender studies as a special subject. In 1997 her doctorate was published under the title “Polnost i kultura: telo i znanje u savremnoj antropologiji” [Gender and Culture: Body and Knowledge in Contemporary Anthropology].

Žarana Papić belonged to the first post-war generation of Yugoslav feminists and had a huge influence on the development of younger generations.

At the time of the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Žarana Papić belonged to the smaller number of intellectuals who rejected war, nationalism and multiethnic conflict. Žarana contributed greatly to the feminist understanding of the nature of the conflicts that broke out of the country by publishing papers clearly linking nationalism, patriarchy and war. She was one of eight women who founded the Belgrade Center for Women’s Studies in 1992 as an alternative place for women intellectual and anti-war activities. Žarana also taught anthropology and gender studies at the Center.

Vasile Paraschiv was one of those who repeatedly protested publicly against the Ceauşescu regime, from 1968 to 1989, for which reason he was several times admitted to psychiatric hospitals and diagnosed as mentally ill. Despite the abuses he suffered, he continually testified about the use of this barbarous method of reducing to silence all those who criticised the communist regime in Romania. Vasile Paraschiv (born 3 April 1928, Clinceni, Ilfov county, died 4 February 2011, Bucharest) was by occupation an electromechanical worker in Ploieşti and, politically speaking, a member of the Communist Party from 1946. In his biographical record at the Sighet Memorial it is mentioned that in 1968, when many others had only just entered the party because Ceauşescu had condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, Paraschiv renounced the status of Romanian Communist Party (PCR) member, because, according to his own account, he had come to understand that the party no longer represented the workers. Consequently he was arrested on 29 July 1969 and admitted to the psychiatric hospital at Urlaţi, Prahova county, but he was discharged after he declared a hunger strike. From this time on, the experience of psychiatric repression became recurrent in Vasile Paraschiv’s life, and in time he became the most well-known witness to this type of forced marginalisation of those who publicly criticised the communist regime, which was practised constantly in Romania as in the Soviet Union, and to which there are a considerable number of testimonies.

On 3 March 1971, Vasile Paraschiv addressed to the Central Committee of the PCR and the General Union of Trade Unions in Romania a list of eleven proposals concerning the liberalisation of trade-union life. He was again arrested, and admitted to the psychiatric asylum at Voila, near Câmpina in Prahova county. In 1976, in a letter sent to Radio Free Europe, he expressed his solidarity with the former members of the Romanian Social-Democratic Party who had suffered political sentences in the first years of the communist regime. He was again admitted to the Voila asylum on 1 December 1976, and kept under observation till 23 December. The diagnosis that he received on this occasion was “paranoic psychopathy… delirious psychosis… pathological antisocial behaviour.” In February 1977, he joined the so-called Goma Movement and signed the joint letter addressed to the Belgrade Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Because he visited the Goma family’s home in Bucharest in April 1977, after Paul Goma had already been interrogated in prison, Vasile Paraschiv was again arrested. After being interrogated by the Securitate in Ploieşti, he was admitted to the section for incurable, violent, and dangerous patients of the psychiatric hospital in Săpoca, Buzău county, where he was subject to physical violence and pharmaceutical treatment for mental illness. In 1978, Vasile Paraschiv made a visit to France, having been permitted to leave by the Securitate in the hope that he would not return. During his stay in Paris, he gave numerous interviews in which he exposed what was happening in the hospitals in which this psychiatric treatment was applied to those who criticised the communist regime in Romania. After returning from France, Vasile Paraschiv joined the short-lived Free Trade Union of the Working People of Romania in 1979, and for this he was again harassed by the Securitate. He was repeatedly arrested, especially during the last years of communism (1987–1989), when discontent with the Ceauşescu regime had grown considerably. The last period that he spent in prison was in the spring of 1989. In 2003, Vasile Paraschiv made a substantial donation to the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance. This contains important documents relating to his activity as a dissident, such as his 366-page letter addressed to Nicolae Ceauşescu, interviews, letters to Radio Free Europe, photographs, and two radio sets with which he listened to Radio Free Europe. These objects are exhibited in the museum collection of the Sighet Memorial.