Exploring the Return of Repression is an exhibition that attempts to explain recent history. "The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values, because morality is gone", writes Hanif Kureishi, British writer of Pakistani descent. "Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?"
The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable "derivatives of the unconscious." This return of the repressed, of ideologies forced to marginalization, of sexuality subject to forced secrecy, has resulted, in recent years, in an almost dramatic change of a society filled with anguish, hallucinations, repression imposed by unnecessary regulations that serve to the repressive violence of governments against their own citizens.
Repression as a conscious and voluntary psychological process, consisting of giving up the fulfillment of a desire which is not in full accord with the moral being, leads to the annihilation and alienation of the simplest desires and rebellions. The main apprehension is now the model of a new international division of labour. This concept has apparently been borrowed by the capitalist leaders from the old socialists, and it is actually hiding something even harsher, something that will bring forth the strengthening of the state as instrument of repression. The new international division of labour is a more important issue to discuss than others, because it is, perhaps, the most important cause of both the political and the civil repression.
On the other hand, if we examine carefully the present legal system, we see that it reveals itself as a revolting system, supporting the class exploitation, the radicalization of the chasm among social classes and the supremacy of the white heteronormative and macho-patriarchal majority. The legal system supports the creation of the political obedience and it deals with the adjustment of the value of work. Actually, it protects the capital creation and a type of legal inequity.
In order to understand the main effects of state violence, we also have to consider the alternative: the social assistance for the poor and for the working class. Frances Fox-Piven and Richard Cloward wrote in New Class War: "The connection between the income maintenance programs, the labour market and profits is indirect, but not complicated". Too much social democracy will make people stop being grateful for low wages and poor work conditions. Thus, even with the converse, the link between state repression, labour market and profits is not complicated at all.
Pavilion Unicredit, the centre of contemporary art and culture, is located in Bucharest’s Victoria Square, at the ground floor of a communist-style apartment building that had been used as a banking center for 15 years, up until 2008. The construction of the actual building started in the communist years and was concluded five years after the fall of the communism, having witnessed the changes of a Stalinist society into a capitalist society. The center uses this space for the implicit messages it conveys, for its location (right across the center of the executive power –the Romanian Government building) and, moreover, for its history, so easily forgotten.
Pavilion Unicredit is a work-in-progress independent space, a place for the production and research in the fields of audiovisual, discursive and performative. It is a space of the critical thinking, and it promotes an artistic perspective implying the social and political involvement of the art and of the cultural institutions. Nevertheless, the basic function of the space will remain the concretization.
The centre is generated by the Pavilion Journal for politics and culture and Bucharest Biennale, projects that are both devised and founded by Răzvan Ion and Eugen Rădescu.