Midissage: Reading with Dorothee Riese

Reading from the book ‘We are here for the silence’

‘The story of a childhood as a social experiment: in the early 1990s, Judith emigrates from Germany to Romania with her parents. Their destination is a remote village in Transylvania on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains. Judith is to grow up in a pristine community free from capitalism. She explores the place, its people, history and language with a keen eye.

She becomes the elective granddaughter of the old Transylvanian Saxon Lizitanti, who gives her a rooster as a present. And she meets Irina, who travels with her goat in the milk lorry. Irina is one of them. Judith wants to be one too, even though her friend resists this appropriation. Soon the contradiction between the utopia they have brought with them and the reality they have found presents the family with ever greater problems.’

A tragicomic story about the painful search for identity, told with literary finesse and a child’s eye that shies away from nothing.

The author Dorothee Riese was born near Göttingen in 1989 and grew up in Romania. She studied International Literature, Slavic Studies and the Culture and History of Central and Eastern Europe in Tübingen, Moscow, Frankfurt an der Oder and Barnaul in southern Siberia. She lives with her family in Leipzig. ‘We are here for the silence’ is her first novel.

More at www.dorotheeriese.de

Photographs from Transylvania 1994/95

Radu Darvas, born in 1973 in Bucharest, first studied there at the Academy of Arts and later in Dresden at the Academy of Fine Arts. As a young boy, he was given a camera and discovered photography. But it was only a few years later, in the period before and during the ‘89 revolution, that Radu began to photograph more and more intensively. He developed the pictures in the bathroom of his prefabricated flat in Bucharest. If it were up to him, he would just take pictures, but what emerged are photos with a fine artistic eye that have gained historical value over time. His style dissolved the distance between himself as a photographer and the people in front of the lens.

Radu Darvas passed away in 2015. His photographic estate comprises several thousand black and white negatives and around 70 developed analogue images. The desire of Mira Darvas, Radu’s second child, to look after the estate gave rise to a small project sponsored by the Department of Culture. With the help of her aunt (Anca Darvas) and her mother (Heike Tuellmann), she is working on archiving the negatives and photographs and analysing what she has seen, some of it familiar and much of it unfamiliar. The complete digitisation of all negatives has not yet taken place. Further rolls of film turned up both in Bucharest and in Dresden. The material that has already been viewed forms the basis for the ‘Wiedergutmachung’ exhibition and provides a very unique insight into Viscri / Deutsch-Weisskirch in 1994/95. Wiedergutmachung, a word that Radu taught his sister, probably a bit of a joke. But today ‘Wiedergutmachung’ also brings a little peace and closes many circles.

Curation: Mira Darvas
Consultancy: Simon Wolf