Tamas Dezso

Spiritual tradition and physical heritage are simultaneously disintegrating in Romania. Time and modernization are beginning to undermine centuries-old traditions preserved in tiny villages, in communities of only a few houses, as well as the bastions of the communist era’s enforced industrialization, which became part and parcel of Romania’s recent history.

Those living in the ‘reservations of forgetting’ blend with nature, exhibiting a humility inherited through generations. They are living out their last days in evident equality of closeness to nature. Helped by time’s decay, they are diligently pulling down the absurd edifices of the environment that was inflicted on them. In the manner of termites, they carry away small pieces of immense concrete constructions on the rickety carts of poverty.

They pick through reinforced concrete frames of former factory monsters, power stations and furnaces, dismantling monuments of formerly enforced modernization which have corroded into a stage set. One year ago, I began photographing the scenes of a world irreversibly decaying, the transformation of a Balkan country surviving the region’s hardest dictatorship. In essence, I am recording two intertwined stories: the physical environment after the fall, and the resilience of humanity struggling to persevere.