During the residency in Timișoara, The Bureau of Melodramatic Research worked on the third part of a film trilogy, a weather forecast playing with one of melodrama’s central characteristics: the emotional charge of its characters pitted against nature. The broader context of global warming and climate change recasts emotions as alien forces coming from the nonhuman realm as uncontrollable demonic possession: a simple breath starts a new climate, a whirl of thought, cyclone while drops of tears gather in dubious waste ponds.
The Bureau of Melodramatic Research was an independent institution founded in 2009 by Irina Gheorghe (b. 1981) and Alina Popa (b. 1982 – d. 2019). The BMR was an independent institution which actualizes itself through social and political realities, always facing the implosion of the possibility for panacea-art in the present. BMR examined the way in which key elements of melodrama were at work on the political scene. Exhibitions (selection): Collection Collective, Art Encounters Biennale, Timișoara (2019), The Dark Side of Nature, MNAC, Bucharest (2015); A cosmic cooking show, mixing up essential ingredients of the new economy, CDA Istanbul and BAK Utrecht (2013); Protect Your Heart at Work – a safety training for the post-fordist emotional workplace, Technical Museum, Warsaw (2012).
