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Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa founded The Bureau of Melodramatic Research in 2009 as a dependent institution investigating the affective modulations of contemporary politics and the emotional performance of labour in the new economy. Their most recent project is a performance and film trilogy taking the form of TV instructional shows also performed as live sessions, a reflection on alienating effects and affects of the current economy of moods. The trilogy builds on the double bind of alienation, on the one hand a process of externalization (and commodification) of emotions and well being, but also an inverse movement of possession by external forces. Rather than lamenting this self-estrangement, the trilogy aims to explore its potential of de-interiorization and distance, recognizing the blurry borders between an intimately confined inside and a terrifyingly anonymous outside. The first two parts of the project are Protect Your Heart at Work, a safety training for the post-fordist emotional workplace and Lovegold: Contemporary Alchemy, a cosmic cooking show proposing lovegold as a composite for an extended economy which does not start or end with the human element. Above the Weather is the last part of the trilogy.
- The Dark Side of Nature, group show - National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 2016
- Feminism is Politics!, group show - Manhattan Gallery, New York, (forthcoming 2016)
Above the Weather, the third work in the trilogy Alien Passions, makes reference to Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1957), taking the title literally, and hinting at the immaterial aspects of weather, and to the materiality of emotions, to the circuit linking affective and natural climates. One of the main characteristics of the melodramatic genre was the emotional charge of its characters pitted against nature, while the broader context of global warming and climate change recasts emotions as alien forces coming from the nonhuman realm as an uncontrollable demonic possession. Above the Weather, a simple breath is the start of a new climate, a whirl of thought is a cyclone and drops of tears gather in dubious waste ponds. (The Bureau of Melodramatic Research)