Vanishing Forms of Social Life. A residency with Vasile Ernu
A series of "meditation-sketches" on the Fabric district, written by Vasile Ernu; the first text — "The Last Non Stop in Timișoara" — retraces the history of the round-the-clock corner kiosk.
"Non Stop was the gateway to eternity" — an affective archaeology of the small institutions that held the 1990s together.
Part ofSocial Fabric #3
"Vanishing Forms of Social Life" is a series of "meditation-sketches" on the Fabric district, written by Vasile Ernu as a guest of the Social Fabric #3 residencies. The first text in the series, "The Last Non Stop in Timișoara", starts from a metal kiosk on a street corner and reads it as a central institution of the 1990s.
"The Non Stop stands above all for the idea of freedom as it was understood in the nineties: the right to buy when you want, two steps from home — a single cigarette, a sachet of instant coffee, a brightly coloured Tec fizzy drink, a bag of puffed corn snacks or vodka in a plastic cup," Ernu writes. There was always a bustle around it, at any hour; going to the Non Stop after midnight "was almost a sacred ritual for testing the limits of freedom". If the 1989 revolution had a meaning, the text suggests, that meaning took shape in the kiosk on the corner.
Vasile Ernu is a writer, born in the USSR in 1971. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy ("Al. I. Cuza" University, Iași, 1996) and holds a master's degree in philosophy ("Babeș-Bolyai" University, Cluj, 1997).