Storytelling café through Transylvania and Romania

Storytelling café for the current exhibition

‘We cordially invite you to a short storytelling tour through Transylvania and Romania. Every time the topic comes up, it triggers a wave of stories that rolls over us from the vast sea of collected stories, usually gently and with a sparkle in their eyes. I discover my own experiences in many of them and the exchange takes everyone back to the time when they themselves travelled through this wonderful country or lived there. Emotional images of reality appear alongside romanticisations, funny moments alongside historical everyday occurrences.

There will be coffee and tea and certainly plenty to talk about.’

Mira Darvas

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, as well as analysing what she has seen, some of which is known and much of which is unknown. 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
Advice: Simon Wolf

Diese Ausstellung wird durch die Landeshauptstadt Dresden, Amt für Kultur und Denkmalschutz gefördert.

Das Projekt wird gefördert durch das Staatsministerium für Soziales und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt. Diese Maßnahme wird mitfinanziert mit Steuermitteln auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushaltes im Rahmen des Förderprogramms »Wir für Sachsen«.