Alessandro Vangi

index

la padure
curating
2025

curating by
Alessandro Vangi
Olesea Bojinov

hosted by
Ilie Cernauțan, mayor of Bașcalia
Vladimir Vasilevici, director of the Bașcalia cultural center

supported by
Otilia Babara director of the film Love is not an orange

thanks to the support on-site of Pierluca Ditano and Valeria Simonini

La padure was born from the desire to rediscover and preserve the audiovisual memory of Bașcalia, a small village in southern Moldova. Our interest is to collect vhs tapes and other analog media belonging to the families of the village, digitize them, and return them to their rightful owners. At the same time, we are building an archive with all the collected material, which will serve as the creative foundation for a documentary film dedicated to the community and its stories. To achieve that, we organized a first public screening at the cultural center in Bașcalia. The film chosen for the occasion was Love Is Not an Orange by Otilia Babara, a work that explores the themes of memory and exodus – an entirely female-led migration that began with the fall of the USSR and is still ongoing today – through archival footage and personal testimonies. The audience responded with great engagement, bringing their videocassettes, which are now in our possession and ready for the digitization process.

To announce the initiative and raise awareness in the community about the importance of audiovisual memory, we chose a location that many pass through daily: the bus stop in the center of the village. Here, we displayed the event poster along with a call for audiovisual materials – a symbolic gesture that transformed a place of transit into an opportunity for collective knowledge and reflection. This public invitation was not only a call for contributions but also a way to reaffirm the value of past images and their role in shaping shared memory in the present.
These first screenings have served as the catalyst for a process aimed at the collective preservation of the past, a way to transform memory into a new shared narrative – one that is alive and participatory – capable of giving it voice and meaning in the present.