Commodity Aesthetics in the Making

The project studies the production of advertising film in postsocialist Romania in a perspective informed by critical theory, film studies, and social history. It considers advertising as a unique resource, which reflects the intense transformations of the economic, political, social and cultural sectors of the country, while it also decisively contributed to those transformations.

The main objective of the project is therefore to extensively map and comprehensively interpret post-socialist commercials not only as influenced by social and political factors, but also as having their own performative and configurative power in shaping the postsocialist subject and their world.

An interdisciplinary research team including a critical phenomenologist, a social historian, two film scholars and a visual artist will tackle this topic focusing on the socio-historical contextualization and critical theorizing of the material, its film scholarly interpretation and its in-depth analysis with the innovative tools of art-based research.

The research will be carried out in three stages corresponding to the three years of the project’s timeline: a preparatory stage, which retraces the period’s complex relationship to the socialist past and situates its production of advertisements; the core stage, which delves into a through transversal analysis of postsocialist commodity culture, and a concluding stage which focuses on the aftermath of postsocialism and its visual culture of advertisements.