Joanne Richardson

A diary of a journey through space and time, composed of subjective impressions of the present and childhood memories of the past. While traveling across Romania in the year of its EU accession, the narrative reflects on transition, the re-writing of history and the relation between images and memory.

Precarious Lives mixes archival footage of women’s labour over the past century with contemporary portraits of Romanian women. The video challenges the dominant discourse about precarity and its disregard of differences based on gender and economic disparities between the first and third worlds of Europe.

Inspired by Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia, this journey to Moldova is narrated through ten letters that reflect on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the contradictory nature of the current power of the communist party, and the uneasy proximity between post-colonialism and nationalism.