“A Map of the Eclipse” distils the uncanny times of post-communist transition into a visual language that reflects an era of profound change. The photo series functions as an index of relics — some fictitious and imagined, and others real and factual. These are fragments of meaning from different aspects of daily life.

In doing so, Horatiu Sovaiala’s visual vocabulary relies on communist artefacts that were rehabilitated, reused, or updated, as well as post-communist ones that have replaced former signs of power. When taken together, however, they collectively signify not only the zeitgeist of an era that we are arguably still living in, but also how meta-narratives, such as history and politics, permeate the everyday.

Without providing answers with regard to this transition — where are we headed, and how long does it take us to get there? (but never seeking to do so in the first place) — the series instead maps out a metamorphosis. A moment in historical time that is preceded by one era and followed by another; a moment that is temporarily obscured by the shadows of grand historical narratives of imagined triumphs, by deceptions, absurdities, or mere coincidences. What is striking, though, in this amalgamation of signs is an idiosyncratic state of in-betweenness: a constant process of grappling and coming to terms with what is hidden behind these shadows.

What the imagery does is to go back in recent history in search of lost memories and souvenirs. These are not dead, but not fully alive either, yet somewhere in between, awaiting to be unearthed from the pile of debris that has already collected over them. On the horizon of a century without a future, the series suggests the inevitability of change. The arrival of light, creeping through the obscuring shadows, becomes an unavoidable and organic stage of an evolution whose subjects are not political leaders but traces of memory materialised in multilayered forms and shapes.


(Petrică Mogoș, 2021)