Cassandra Voices

Author: Gary Farrelly

  • Tunnel Vision in Chișinău, Moldova

    Gary Farrelly is an Irish visual and performance artist based in Brussels. Together with his German collaborator Chris Dreier, he works under the banner of Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence. O.J.A.I. is a self-styled paraintelligence agency, conducting artistic research in the fields of institutional power, bureaucracy, erotic architecture, ritualistic magic and pedestrian tunnels. The following text is an account of how they fell in love with Chișinău, Europe’s least visited capital city. The author explicitly stipulates that these words are not intended as either a visitors guide to the city nor as a briefing on the current political situation.

    Bald and Bankrupt

    On April 19th 2019, a prominent Russophile YouTuber called Bald and Bankrupt uploaded a video about Moldova entitled Nobody Visits This Country…Find Out Why.

    Mr Bald aka Benjamin Rich, is niche-famous for his swashbuckling travel vlogs exploring obscure corners of the former Eastern Block, with an obsessive interest in the ex-Soviet republics. His videos focus on forgotten and defamed Communist-era architecture and monuments, always demonstrating seemingly genuine care towards the subject matter.

    For some unknown reason however – quite uncharacteristically – all his generosity evaporated the day he arrived in Chișinău, Moldova’s capital. In a very brutal fashion, that day’s upload catalogued a litany of the city’s most embarrassing post-independence scars: cracked pavements, abandoned mega-hotel, dried up fountains, dilapidated apartment blocks and a rusted wheelchair ramp.

    As he passes POV style through a ramshackle section of pedestrian tunnel, the video reaches its crescendo of defamatory impact, providing a scorching portrayal of the Moldovan capital as an obliterated void inhabited by corrupt elites and demoralized citizens.

    In a very real sense, Chișinău’s reputation was assassinated in the tunnel. As of now, the video has been watched over 11,000,000 times. This makes it by far the most viewed video about the city (or the country for that matter) anywhere on the internet.

    Screenshot of Bald and Bankrupt in Chișinău.

    Down a Rabbit Hole

    Myself and Chris came across this video at the exact moment we were devoting ourselves to a series of performances, musical scores, and radio broadcasts recasting neglected tunnels as sites for performative assembly.

    We were down a rabbit hole of defamatory material related to tunnels such as the infamous assault scene in Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible and other nerve shredding depictions from movies such as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, THX 1138, Possession, Men, IT, and Logan’s Run.

    We had a burning desire to visit the scene of the Chișinău assassination! So we got in touch with Oberliht, the Moldovan Young Artists Association who were taking submissions for their annual EDU-Art Conference. They accepted our proposal for a Musique Concrète workshop to take place inside the notorious tunnel, using the site-specific acoustics of the architecture to produce a collaborative sound piece with the participants.

    The conference took place in Autumn 2020 when Moldova’s borders were still closed to all but essential travellers due to the pandemic. We asked the organisers to furnish us with the most serious looking letter of invitation possible, completely steamed clean of any artistic flourishes. The word ‘artist’ was dropped from the text and replaced with ‘cultural researcher’ which we deemed much more likely to pass as ‘essential’.

    We arrived at Chișinău Airport at midnight. An intimidating ice maiden border guard in military uniform inspected our “essential traveller” documents for an unnervingly long time before rubber stamping our admission to the Republic of Moldova.

    Enjoying Chișinău with my friend, writer and filmmaker Roisin Agnew during our sloppy summer vacation to the city in 2021.

    First Impressions

    Chișinău is an attractive city, laid out on a compact human-friendly scale, it’s comparable in size to Antwerp, Reykjavik, Belfast or Wuppertal.

    Arriving downtown following the footsteps of Bald and Bankrupt we first encounter the abandoned National Hotel, an impressive Soviet-era behemoth with dried up fountain plaza at street level. Many say it mars the visitor’s first impression of the city. I disagree. I’m drawn to its sturdy, masculine structure.

    The downtown area features an attractive mix of historical architectural styles and luscious green public spaces.

    Typically, I’m not enamoured with ornate old buildings so I didn’t go out of my way to see those things. I was more intrigued by the presence of Soviet-era structures like the Moldtelecom Tower, National Opera & Ballet, Presidential Palace, national parliament and further afield, the State Circus and iconic Romashka ‘Ear of Corn’ residential tower.

    These are imposing, modernist fortresses, constructed in heavy cast concrete, shamelessly still reifying the power of the Soviet state into the public space.

    It was a pleasant surprise to find that there is more than one defamed subterranean passageway running under the central districts.

    We enlisted the help of a well-known local tour guide named Nikolai, who took us on a walking tour connecting all the known pedestrian tunnels and modern office blocks in the area (this was a customised trajectory especially for us). Nikolai was a generous guide, and as we spelunked our way across the city; he talked about the challenges of forging a new national identity in the ideological and spatial debris field left in the wake of the Soviet Union.

    The Soviets had all the resources and coercive power in the world to throw at substantiating and mythologizing their state institutions. Independent Moldova, on the other hand, is facing challenges as a small and fragile state with limited resources and influence on the global stage.

    According to United Nations data, an estimated 1.27 million people emigrated from Moldova between 1990 and 2020, which is rather a lot considering the current population is just under three million.

    This brain drain has had a significant impact on Moldova’s ability to develop and prosper, and many citizens are concerned about the future prospects of their young state.

    Chris Dreier at the State Circus, summer 2021.

    Tunnels Cannot be Avoided

    An ideal day in Chisinau involves lots of wandering and enjoying strange urbanism and generous public parks. Tunnels cannot be avoided due to the epic wide boulevards that crisscross the downtown.

    Due to a strategic location between Russian and European cultural and economic influences, most of the commercial and retail environment is unfamiliar to me. I don’t recognise these banks, clothing brands, billboard advertisements, travel agencies or supermarket chains. The unfamiliarity is pleasurable, I feel like I’ve really travelled somewhere.

    A highpoint is lunch at the performatively bureaucratic trade union cafeteria, introduced to us by our friends Clara and Ana. The subsidized restaurant is an unfashionable trace of post collective social organisation. Customers dine under harsh LED chandeliers at banquet tables with white doily-drape and bouquets of synthetic red roses.

    Moldova is a pretty religious place and the public morality and culture are perceptively conservative to someone coming from Western Europe. If there is an alternative scene, a counter-reaction to the conformist social body, it resides in the Zemstvei Building, a former museum now inhabited by cycling activists, a queer café and the Zpațiu / Zpace contemporary art project space.

    The highpoint is at the end of the hall at 3rd Space, an artist studio inhabited by the Drujba and Kolxoz (Collective Economy) art collectives. I’m particularly enamoured with Kolxoz. Their work revolving around DIY group publishing strikes me as being particularly radical. My last night in Chisinau (this January) was spent with Kolxoz drinking Transnistrian cognac and debating whether Lenin has been ‘cancelled’ in post Cold War Eastern Europe.

    Mixed apartment and retail block, downtown Chișinău, photo Roisin Agnew.

    Subsequent Visits

    We make several more trips to Chisinau over the next few years. On subsequent visits, it becomes clear that an ambitious municipal beautification scheme has kicked into gear. Pavements have been lavishly restored, buildings freshly painted, and there is fancy new street signage and flower arrangements.

    Interestingly, the pedestrian tunnel in Bald and Bankrupt’s video has been restored to its pristine state. There is a conspiracy theory floating around that the powers that be were so mortified by the video that heads rolled and a massive Tunnel Improvement plan was hastily brought into being.

    Some fine restaurants, fancy cafes, trendy bars and shops are popping up here and there. Chisinau is reinventing itself, with the clear ambition of someday being a mainstream tourist destination, a slightly cheaper, more parochial Bucharest or Cracow.

    It’s a long term plan though, and for the moment being here feels a million miles away from more banal, mediated tourist experiences further west; the city-break destinations characterised by lime scooters, QR code explanations, bubble tea, Van Gogh 3D and the big red fun bus tours.

    This city hasn’t figured out how to market itself to an external gaze. It’s just a medium-sized working city, with really good pedestrian tunnels and office blocks, where people live and go to work and worry about the future. It’s refreshingly dull and I like it.

    Kolxoz in their Headquarters at the former Zemstvei Museum. Copyright Kolxoz.

    Feature Image: Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence in front of National Hotel, Chișinău photo Victoria Tihonova

  • Featured Artist: Gary Farrelly

    Over the last seven years, I have been reshaping my practice from being primarily hermetic, manual and materially fixated into a more fugitive, performative state. Around 2015, I had a rising feeling that my drawings, prints and collages no longer had the capacity to hold the kinds of storytelling and speculation that I needed to transmit. I was frustrated that my core desires: to communicate, speculate, pronounce, denounce, seduce and lead up the garden path, were being limited by what I had come to view as the chicanery of my materials.

    Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati in 2022, image Teresa Burkey.

    One of very few consistent back-channels to my material practice that stayed open during the rearrangement process was a project called Going Postal. In 2013 I had entered into an iron clad arrangement with the MSURS – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia). I had solemnly committed to sending them a flat artefact, unenveloped in the postal system at least four times annually until my projected year of death in 2077.  I have faithfully maintained this undertaking over the years and when the project concludes on 19/11/2077, 256 items will have been integrated into their collection.

    Dispatch 2015112 (2015) courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Republika Srpska.

    Around the time I was taking a sabbatical from the physical manufacture of artworks, I was deep in the guts of a multi-annual film project called GLUE with my dear friend Oisin Byrne. We had both left Ireland a couple of years earlier, I went to Brussels, and he relocated to London. For over half a decade, the making of GLUE was the structure that kept us embedded in each other’s everyday lives. The final shape of GLUE was a semi-fictional concoction of my experiences of the sleep disorder narcolepsy told through manic and confessional monologues. The project was the first time I positioned my verbal and physical performativity as tip of the spear of my work. The public premier of GLUE was in Salzburger Kunstverein in the summer of 2018.

    Angry letter scene from GLUE (2017) directed by Oisin Byrne

    In January 2015, I met Berlin based photographer and sound artist Chris Dreier. We were introduced to each other over dinner in the Germany city of Wuppertal. Our first conversation was about Charleroi, the mangled capital of Belgium’s post-industrial rustbelt. Our alliance was instantaneous. Since then, we have been sending each other weekly postcard briefings obsessively focused on our shared interests in corporate architecture, finance, disasters, institutions, political assassinations and magic. From the beginning, we always understood the correspondence as a receptacle for some shared knowledge we were both trying to capture. On October 3rd, 2015 we codified our relationship into an institution and established the Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence O.J.A.I..

    A selection of Office for Joint Administrative postcard correspondence. Image Fabrice Scheider.

    Office for joint Administrative intelligence is configured as a DIY para-intelligence agency operating between Brussels and Berlin. I would describe our process as having some research components, in that we gather knowledge based on hyper-specific fields of enquiry – pedestrian tunnels, market shocks, plane crashes, dried up fountains, lonely office blocks, pornography staged in modernist architecture and public announcements (over Tanoy). The research component is not an end in itself. We use the information mined from economic, political and architectural sources as a departure point for uncanny speculation and highly subjective fiction making.

    This process manifests in the public space as performances, fieldtrips, audits, annual reports, office installations, audio wallpaper, vinyl records, architectural plans, psycho-cartography and our monthly radio show transmitting on Dublin Digital Radio and Cashmere Radio Berlin.

    In 2021, I enrolled at a.pass in Brussels, an artistic research environment coalesced around performativity and scenography. My project, in close cooperation with the office, departed from the work of deceased American conservative conspiracy theorist William Milton Cooper. Cooper’s work was a precursor to QAnon and encountered the public through the polemical Hour Of The Time radio show which synthesized economic and political ‘research’, occult knowledge, personal grievance, and manic episodes into a paranoid tsunami designed to undermine public confidence in institutions.

    During my time at a.pass, I developed various performative versions of myself as an agent for disinformation, including: the bureaucrat, the crossdresser, the seducer, the charlatan, the guide, the joker, the devil’s advocate, the instructor and the Cassandra.

    a.pass end performance, Brussels  (2022). Image Karolien Chromiak.

    My current exhibition Proximity Papers – new works from an organisational self – is my first solo exhibition since 2015 and my first major project outside the office in as many years. On the curatorial initiative of Various Artists, the show signals a reignition of my attraction to slow and repetitive processes of hand manufacture such as stitching, stencilling, typing, folding, labelling and redacting. Channeling the same set of political and architectural imaginaries that inhabit the more bombastic performance work, the pieces in the show are encoded with systemic fictions, self-referencing data, geographical imaginaries and lots of modernist ghosts.

    Proximity Papers invitation postcard

    My starting point was a series of postcards that I made for the Project Arts Centre BAE publication a couple of years back. They depict Dublin’s most iconic modernist office blocks: Liberty Hall, the civic offices, Apollo House, the Irish Life Centre etc. These were the first buildings I ever loved.

    I have always been perversely attracted to the unequivocal, disciplinarian presence of post-war buildings in cities. Even as a kid, I knew that these erections were encoded at a genetic level with simultaneously seductive and coercive political instructions. Buildings are dangerous. I have spent my adult life pondering the question: what subliminal messages are these structures asserting into the public space? What do the buildings want?

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    Most of the materials in the show were subjected to prolonged direct physical contact with my body. I carried the A4 drawings folded up in my pocket for prolonged periods, larger works were digested at the bottom of my tote bag or flattened under my mattress. I took the two main pieces of the show – a set of watercolour election result maps – into the shower with me every day for a month, carefully bleaching the constituency areas to simulate transitions of power. These processes were extremely destructive to the integrity of the materials and at some stage the works risked disintegration. The second set of processes consisted of repairing, restoring and devoting care to the surfaces. Bringing them back from the dead.

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    The work is characterised by a jaded bureaucratic, architectural sensibility. Some of the works consist of repetitive text piled up to look like tower blocks ‘IT IS OFFICIAL POLICY TO APPEAR UNMOVED’.

    The only human presence in the show is a screen-grab from a gay pornographic film where a young heterosexual male hustler is paid to receive oral sex from a gay protagonist. He doesn’t like it. I intervened in the image with delicate rows of my patented embroidery pattern the quasi-autonomous stitch. This work is part of straighsploitation – my ongoing ‘research’ into representations of straight male bodies in gay porn. Other works in the show include: Teri Garr International Airport, Grosser flughafen verspätung taurigkeit (Big Airport Delay Sadess), Systems Merger, Gray Parliament and Regional Conflict Map.

    The word ‘YES’ is recurring throughout the show, part act of self-encouragement/partially ironic. All the works are stamped on the rear with my name, date of birth and projected expiry date- Gary Farrelly (1983-2077). I will be ninety-six-years-old if the prediction is accurate. Specially constructed display units were designed and built by Remy vanderhaegen. The show was executed with the generous support of The Arts Council and Fingal Arts Office. Sincere thanks to Various, Phyllis, An and Loes and Remy vanderhaegen.

    Proximity Papers opening night at Nadine, Brussels. Image An Goovaerts.

    Proximity Paper is on view at Nadine/NOdine Laboratory for Contemporary Art at 105 Rue de Laeken, Brussels 1000 until December 8th: https://index.nadine.be/proximity-papers-new-works-from-an-organisational-self/

    Gary’s work is part of the group show ‘Why Be An Artist’ on show at NCAD gallery in Dublin from December 1 2022 to February 15, 2023: https://www.ncad.ie/gallery-event/view/why-be-an-artist

    The Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence’s radio show No Tourists transmits regularly on Dublin Digital Radio: https://listen.dublindigitalradio.com/resident/no-tourists

    Instagram: @jointintelligence

    Featured Image: a.pass end performance, Brussels (2022). Image Karolien Chromiak.