Kitsch affairs
It all began with the clearing out of a cellar in Rome. But don’t get me wrong! I was the one who called them to get rid of furniture and various objects I had taken back from the house after separating from my wife. I took the furniture back out of stubbornness, not because I liked it or needed it. In fact, after a year of it sitting untouched in the cellar, I typed “Cellar clearance” into the internet and arranged a deal with a guy who had a youthful voice and a foreign accent. Gypsies: they came and did a spotless job.
About a month later, my racing bike disappeared from the garage, a second-hand one I had bought only ten days earlier, but of great quality. I immediately thought of the gypsies, but it couldn’t have been them: the garage was 100 meters away from the cellar, and they didn’t even know it existed. Still, I called them and mentioned it. They asked for the address, and two days later they had the bike brought back to me, complete with apologies. We became friends.
That’s how I ended up attending two weddings (not as a photographer, but as a guest) in Romania, in Călărași: a shapeless little town on the stretch of the Danube that borders Bulgaria. The first time I was invited by the bride, and the second by the groom. I merged the two events of this family into a broader story: the story of a community that, for one month a year between June and July, returns to the town where they were born, where they also come back to give birth to their children and, one day, to be buried.
In that month, the young (and even the very young) get married. In a neighborhood on the edge of town, with the crumbling apartment blocks of the old regime surrounding their cemetery as if it were a park. Where, with pride, they have bought and renovated apartments according to their means. Everyone knows each other, and everyone, or almost everyone, is invited to a wedding nearly every day, scheduled in sequence in the same venue, with the same photographers taking their pictures in the same public park.
In this way, I discovered and came to value this community: welcoming, caring, simple, and self-ironic; with deep-rooted traditions, with an archaic and religious sense of attachment to the family. A united community that overturned my prejudices about cleanliness and loyalty. And that found my bicycle for me.