This exhibition, held in Montjuïc Castle from 1 October 2014 to 11 January 2015 and organised around the works of photographers Florin Andreescu and Andrei Pandele, portrays Romanian society in the last few years of the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu through scenes taken from everyday life, as well as images of the events of the revolution of December 1989.
“Romania Flashback” was part of the programme Europa 25 un cicle de cinc exposicions, a series of five exhibitions that Barcelona City Council organised in the city to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with events in 1989 that changed the course of European history.
With the aim of fostering knowledge of these events and with twenty-five years of hindsight, several presentations, coordinated by journalist Martin Anglada, explained how they took place and how they have changed the lives of many Europeans.
Twenty-five years earlier, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union took the first steps towards its collapse (1991). The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, dominated by the Soviet communist system, had initiated the liberation process that led to the creation of democratic states. In this context, Romanian society rebelled against the dictatorship of the Socialist Republic of Romania. The situation in Romania signalled a more traumatic end to the regime than in other Soviet Union satellite countries, and with fewer possibilities of making the agreed transition toward free elections and a new democratic phase. The uprising against Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship, which began in the city of Timisoara on 16 December 1989, culminated on December 22 with the arrest of Ceausescu and his wife Elena, who were executed three days later, on Christmas day 1989. The despotic regime headed by Ceausescu and his family clan was the only one that responded with violence against the population during its downfall, with more than a thousand deaths during the revolution and before the consolidation of the new democratic government.
The exhibition presented a selection of the visual documentation produced during the last years of the regime. The Romanian photographers Andrei Pandele and Florin Andreescu, working clandestinely and dodging the controls of the Securitate – Ceausescu’s secret police, notorious for their brutality – captured, on the one hand, the daily life of an impoverished society during the last years of the dictatorship, and, on the other, the excitement and drama of the popular uprising of December 1989, which concluded with the arrest, conviction and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife.