In love with Romania by Constantin Nimigean

IN LOVE WITH

ROMANIA Photographs by Gerrit Jan Robeer Text by Tamara Robeer

s time passes my attention more frequently turns to found pictures. Looking at little moments, a life passing and dreams realised. I have to say those moments help me look forward and create precious little moments for myself. Three years ago I inherited an archive with a couple of hundred black and white negatives; the pictures belonged to my father, Gerrit Jan Robeer. I started scanning them and slowly a new truth revealed itself. He grew up in a Dutch catholic family with two older sisters and lived in the house attached to the church. My father wasn’t religious in his beliefs, just a teenager during the flower power period: long hair, flared jeans and a small moped. In June 1970 (20 years old), he bought his first camera, made some test shots and became addicted. To escape from his (western) social environment and the family restrictions he made holiday trips to Eastern Europe, surely also to anger his parents, as they were afraid of the unknown. Romania became the country he adored. Valuable moments as a child were those during diner, when your parents tell all the stories from back in the days. My mother, Nela Marinescu, was born in Bucharest and trained to be a gymnast. At one point her team even shared a training space with Nadia Comăneci. She had numerous stories, which sounded like fairy tales to me. In the beginning I didn’t think they were true, as I grew older I realised what they meant. She was at her grandparents’ home in a Romanian countryside village. There were horses, chickens and a big pig. In my memory the pig ended up on the roof of the house because my mother made him angry. My father used to be the one telling stories about how he met my mother. He also talked a lot about Romania as a country, but never mentioned his photographs. The first time they met was in Eforie Nord, he was different, did what he wanted, had a great smile and long hair. She was a boy-ish girl always on the look out for some kind of adrenaline rush. After that summer my father told her he would come back, she didn’t believe him. A few months later he got back into his car and drove straight to Bucharest. Often he told the story about the fried chicken breast my grandmother gave him to eat on these trips. A couple of miles before the Romanian border he started throwing them out of the window, one by one. As soon as he arrived there, he was told to open the car, step out and go to an office where the customs officer just let him sit for a while. My father enjoyed taking his time, slowly putting the stuff they took out of the car back in the car, even taking a cigarette Bucharest, 1974 © Gerrit Jan Robeer/Tamara Robeer

Brașov, 1974 © Gerrit Jan Robeer/ Tamara Robeer 27

Eforie, 1973 ÂŠ Gerrit Jan Robeer/ Tamara Robeer 28

Eforie, 1972 © Gerrit Jan Robeer/Tamara Robeer

Bucharest, 1972 © Gerrit Jan Robeer/Tamara Robeer

break. It was a game he played every single time he was there. The customs officers started to recognise him and called my mother on later trips to tell her he was coming. My Romanian grandparents didn’t trust him at first, ‘why does this Dutch boy keep coming back?’ The story goes that my grandfather once stood behind the door with a frying pan, ready to hit my father when he came in. Because of his religious family my father wasn’t raised with the concept of nudity, it was something private. One time he arrived a bit early at my mother’s house, no one was home. Before he realised it a neighbor accompanied him from the parking lot and within 5 minutes he was sitting in a bath tub for more than one hour and ate an extensive meal. Completely out of his comfort zone he waited until his girlfriend came home. Drunk and overeaten he went straight to bed. They got married in August 1974 in Bucharest. It took a year before my mother was allowed to leave Romania. My father wrote letters to the Dutch royal family asking to help my mother; she was losing weight rapidly because the situation made her nervous. Under the communist regime it wasn’t allowed to take school diplomas across the border. Secretly they made copies of them at the Dutch embassy and smuggled them out of Romania. Also she was obligated to return all the medals she had won at gymnastic competitions, my grandfather arranged for the gold medal to be melted into a golden ring with a little heart on it. The photographs are windows into a day, a moment, a captured fraction of a second a long time ago that can tell you so much about the person and the time they lived in. A narrative of frozen moments, tied together by personal recollection. I guess there’s part of me that holds onto these memories and moments to give them a second life. They also play an important part in shaping our own history and can over time begin to shape our memories. Do we remember the event as it happened, or do we remember it because there is a picture of it? 29

Although they are found images, the archive negatives are at the heart of my work. The archive is matched by my own search for identity and family connections. Just as nostalgia is a reoccurring theme, I seek to restore broken family connections and build new personal experiences within Romania. They are a starting point and give me knowledge to go out in the world. I learned to understand why my father gave me the camera, the choice to pursue my dreams, a wonderful mother and an opportunity to fall in love with Romania too. •

Tamara Robeer (1981) initially studied economics and started a career in video game industry public relations. During this time she realised she wanted to tell visual stories and now studies documentary photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, Netherlands. Being half Dutch, half Romanian she was only able to visit Romania for the first time at the age of 14 because of the Romanian Revolution. Using photography, Tamara searches a relationship with her family, Romania as a county, the older generation and a new perspective through the eyes of the younger generation. She tries to connect to a country that feels so familiar and is completely unknown at the same time. more on http://tamararobeer.viewbook.com http://tamararobeer.tumblr.com http://gjproject.tumblr.com 31