The biggest art heist in our city’s recent history has gone unnoticed for more than a year. It was not until a ten-year-old discovered that the dozen coloured mosaics filling the potholes in Bucharest’s city centre could be assembled into an imperfect puzzle revealing a QR code that the theft was acknowledged. The thieves had published a self-denunciation video and had shared its link in the form of little pavement mosaics spread across the city. The heist turned out to be a performance act called The City and the City. The thieves – a group of artists, architects and scientists who ground their art practice in context hacking and call themselves fri[]mosaic. The artwork stolen – Looking Back to Look Forward, Vlad Nancă’s creation from 2021: an impressive 50-square-meter mosaic which takes inspiration from Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Space Construction No. 12 from 1920, the atom model, and the Vanguard and Sputnik 1 satellites. The reason behind the theft: the restoration of another mosaic – the neglected socialist realist mosaic on the facade of the Simion Stoilow Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy.

How was the theft of the mosaic possible, given that it is located in a private building in constant use? The fri[]mosaic art crew uses a double double indirect method for their performances: they first scan the artworks and create detailed 3D models of the mosaics using photogrammetry. They analyse the models to find the best pieces from the contemporary mosaics to replace the ones missing in the socialist mosaics. Then, they steal the optimal pieces. With computational aid, they create patches which they mount using the double indirect method: a quick and very precise installation technique.

Not much was known about fri[]mosaic. Only that they reject the comparison with the famous French street artist Invader, who has been relentlessly glueing ceramic tiles on the buildings of Paris for more than thirty years. So I sat down with Noether, one of the members of fri[]mosaic, a mathematician working in algebraic geometry, to try to find out more about their work.

All your base are belong to us

C: What is context hacking? And how do your artistic creed and practice align with its manifesto?

N: Context hacking is a cultural practice built around the idea that hacking is a skill that can and should be transferred to social artefacts. The objectives and methods of a hacker are applied “to the network of social relationships in which artistic production occurs, and upon which it is dependent”. The general metaphor implies that these relationships are prescribed by some kind of source code, similarly to how software runs. Context hacking is about gaining access to these cultural programs and controlling their user interfaces. “When we know how a space, a niche, a scene, a subculture or a media or political practice functions, we can change it and recode it, deconstructing its power relationships and emancipating ourselves from its compulsions and packaging guidelines” (Friesinger 2013).

C: Is it a form of cultural activism?

N: Context hacking links political activism and art. It implies transgressing the boundaries of these fields, “breaching their rules and self-referential rituals, irritating public perception” by “not reproducing the system boundary between the art and politics (and with it the order of bourgeois society).” It implies context hopping (from one field to another) and context bending: “alongside its interventions, it also engages in performative play with contextualizing roles and role expectations […] contextual semiotic systems and dominant codes are defamiliarized. Context hacking can be both a hostile takeover or a productive intervention for the purpose of eliminating barriers and improving existing media, scenes, niches or subcultures” (Friesinger 2013).

C: To continue the technological metaphor, does context hacking imply breaching access barriers to emancipatory contexts in a way akin to the one in which computer hackers break firewalls to infiltrate into networks?

N: Indeed. “Gaining access to exclusive spaces or contexts is also a form (or preform) of context hacking.” But context hacking is also about how you gain access. It is performative. The break-in must be plausible, even elegant in some way. Context hackers play “with representations and identities, with alienation and over-identification [into the] starting point for political interventions”. They organise themselves as “communication guerrillas, who can assume prominent positions in the media or in power structures for the duration of an action or a prank, because they can set themselves in scene using speech and logic that legitimate their illegitimate intervention” (Friesinger 2013).

C: So it’s not only about gaining momentary access to these spaces. It is also about sustaining the illusion of having the legitimate right to be there.

N: Absolutely. We “do not approach the narrative at hand from outside. By assimilating it and blending in with it, we are able to initiate effective modifications or to stage irritating breaches, whose success is dependent upon achieving the illusion of contextual adequacy” (Friesinger 2013).

Monumental hegemony

C: Why did you choose this context in particular? Why mosaics? Why stage a fight between socialist realist mosaics and contemporary mosaics sprung from and decorating the church or epitomes of capitalist culture, such as banks and residential complexes?

N: We love mosaics. This is the short answer. It is, firstly, a matter of preserving the heritage. All the mosaics that we included in our work were neglected and deteriorated. We started with the idea of just documenting, scanning, and modelling the mosaics as an effort towards their conservation. We did not intend to do any artistic intervention on the mosaics, not even on their digital twins. And we decided to do this archival work because we knew that no one else would do it. Not just because of a lack of funding, but because of a lack of interest as well. In fact, these mosaics are some of the happy examples of decorative artworks that have survived through decades of decay and neglect. We have a very complicated relationship with our recent history. As Groys was noting, “the slogan of socialist realism has been regarded by independent histori­ography both within the Soviet Union and elsewhere as merely a bugaboo used by the censorship to persecute and destroy genuine art and its creators. Viewed from this per­spective, the entire Stalin period is one long martyrology or history of persecutions, which it indeed undoubtedly was. Numerous sculp­tures, frescoes, mosaics, and buildings were simply destroyed in the process of de-Stalinization” (Groys 1992). This applies just as well to our socialist realist heritage. The aesthetics of socialist realism still arouses more interest in the West than in our country: “such problems are not only officially taboo but are also off limits to independent public opinion, which would rather forget past mistakes than open still unhealed wounds” (Groys 1992).

C: Indeed, people are looking away from socialist realist monumental art, whether in the form of large-scale sculptures, murals, or mosaics, less so because of its aesthetics, but rather as a critique of its role in legitimising the old state power. It is hard to forget that it served as a powerful tool for reinforcing hegemonic ideologies. It still symbolises power and control.

N: That is true for all kinds of monumental art: as a form of the superstructure, it always serves the interests of the ruling class by reinforcing dominant ideologies and power structures. It has always been a tool used by the ruling class, the state and elite groups to assert their dominance, shape public consciousness, legitimise the existing structures, and secure the consent of the masses – cultural hegemony, as you say. So why aren’t people looking away from imperial monumental art as well? I’m not sure they would fancy the ideology behind that either.  

C: I agree. Monumental art operates as a form of political theology, as Agamben describes it in The Kingdom and the Glory, symbolising the intersection of sacred authority and secular governance – by presenting its power as both eternal and divine, transcending temporal political structures, and creating a sense of permanence that aligns with state interests.

N: I don’t know, I haven’t read Agamben’s work, and I’d be wary of trespassing on theological grounds. But it is true that mosaics, with their grandeur and enduring presence in places of power (be them churches or other institutions of power), have symbolised the authority and stability of the ruling powers. They have always been ideal vehicles for conveying ideologies to the masses, once through their form — highly decorative, and through their embedding in public spaces, demanding constant engagement with the viewer, reinforcing the message through repetition and visibility. But I think there’s another aspect of socialist realist mosaics, more relevant to our revolt against neglect than the fact that underpinning it “was the Marxist doctrine of dialectical and historical materialism, which defined the socialist revolution as the final stage of a dialectical evolution” (Groys 2003).

C: Which is?

N: Its human scale.

Human scale

C: The human scale of monumental art?

N: Well, no, obviously. The care for the human scale of socialist realist architecture and the constraints imposed on the monumental art decorating it to limit facade-ism. “The architectural critics of that era led an indefatigable battle against facade-ism, […] against the fascination with decoration, arguing instead for the functionality and livability of buildings that were to correspond to human scale and human needs” (Groys 2003). But the crucial aspect of this demand on architects and artists is that it “implied emotional connection: the socialist building was to look monumental but at the same time seem intimate, human, cozy” (Groys 2003). Mosaics were often used to reach this balance. Why did this work? Because socialist realist mosaics (as most socialist realist art) “shared the ‘historical opti­mism’, ‘love of the people’, ‘love of life’, ‘genuine human­ism’, and other positive properties characteristic of all art ex­pressing the interests of the oppressed and progressive classes everywhere in all historical periods”. So they “acquired the right to use any progressive art of the past as a model”, the progressive art in case including Greek antiquity, Italian Renaissance, and nineteenth-century Russian realism (Groys 1992).

C: Indeed; it has served good vibes only, hasn’t it? Socialist realism’s main distinguishing function was transformative: it was not the art of depicting the world but of changing it for the better.

N: Yes, the transformative “function was incorporated into the new method by the tradition of social education that had been part of all earlier Russian literature as well as by the Marxist concept of new superstructures as changing and not only explaining the world, and, finally, by its founder, Maxim Gorky, who viewed culture as a second nature and the goal of art as the creation of a second reality” (Dobrenko 2020).

C: De-realizing reality.

N: It considered that “historical time had ended and therefore occupied no particular place in it”. And it “looked upon history as the arena of struggle between active, demi­urgic, creative, progressive art aspiring to build a new world in the interests of the oppressed classes and passive, contem­plative art that does not believe in or desire change but accepts things as they are or dreams of the past.” So “there was thus no reason to strive for formal innovation, since novelty was automatically guaran­teed by the total novelty of superhistorical content and signifi­cance. Nor did this aesthetics fear charges of eclecticism, for it did not regard the right to borrow from all ages as eclectic; after all, it selected only progressive art, which possesses inher­ent unity” (Groys 1992). And this is one of the reasons why these artworks seem timeless. You can put a contemporary mosaic next to one which is 60 years old, and they are perfectly compatible. Thus, a perfect match for a living donor tile transplant!

De-realizing reality

C: How did you decide to turn your digital works into performances of real mosaic-tile swapping?

N: It happened when we started planning the work on the digital twin for Vlad Nancă’s Looking Back to Look Forward. There’s a scene in Radu Jude’s Barbarians (Jude 2018) in which the protagonist is walking on Calea Victoriei and she stops in front of the Dimitrie Cesianu House, the former German Legation (or after 1989, Victoria Casino; or now, a bank hub where the mosaic happens to be installed) to take a picture of it. She then walks away, but the camera stays on the building long enough to make you feel uncomfortable. That’s what we wanted to do through our performance: hold the camera for a while longer on these artworks.

C: Up to that point, you only scanned socialist realist mosaics for archival purposes?

N: No, at that point, we already had some digital works for which we paired socialist realist mosaics with recent mosaics. We first did the archival work for the mosaics (photography, measuring, scans), and then we built their digital twins – detailed 3D models using photogrammetry. Then we altered these models by taking optimal tiles from the model of the recent mosaic to replace the missing tiles from the soviet mosaic, and recorded the swap as a 3D animation. Building these models was not difficult because we had easy access to the mosaics. We had only swapped digital tiles between some exterior mosaics in a luxury residential complex and the neglected exterior mosaics on the A7 and A6 student dorms from the Agronomic Campus, designed by artists Sabina Ivașcu, Dumitrache Daniel, Dan Mohanu and Boldura Ovidiu in 1980. Perhaps we already had another small digital patch in which we’ve used tiles from kitschy and poorly executed mosaics on the facade of some random residential buildings in rich neighbourhoods, such as the one on street E. Porumbaru. But we quickly realised that gaining access to Looking Back to Look Forward would be much more difficult. And if we were to invest so many resources to do that, why not leave a proper mark while at it? I think Étale (whose research focuses on tessellation and computational geometry, and who wrote the algorithm for finding the optimal replacing tiles) was the one who first suggested we should try it.

C: How about the restoration of the Flowers and Bees mosaic panel on the Veceslav Harnaj Beekeeping Complex using tiles from the mosaics in the new Orthodox Cathedral? What is the right chronology? Was it difficult to get hold of the holy pieces?

N: When we decided we wanted to swap tiles in real life, we went back to the Agronomic Campus and the residential complex and practised on those mosaics. We used cheap tiles from diy art shops to replace the borrowed tiles from the mosaic in the residential complex. This first performance took us about a month in total, including preparations. We took our time to learn how to do everything properly. Our next performance, which involved using tiles from the cathedral to fix the Flowers and Bees mosaic designed by Maria Chelsoi and Ioan Tureatcă in the ’60s, was in fact easier to plan and implement. The cathedral was still a construction site – a huge, chaotic construction site, so an environment where it was not difficult to purchase a few hours of meditation and contemplation in solitude. Obviously, we didn’t scan all the mosaics there. We scanned just two or three panels and replaced some irrelevant, uncut tiles. We again used the cheapest tiles we could find in the diy art shop to fill the gaps. We’d like to return someday and continue the scan, but that would be, I imagine, quite impossible.

The City and the City (Miéville 2009)

C: Why was the The City and the City performance so difficult?

N: For this performance, we had to extract tiles from Looking Back to Look Forward to repair G. Iacob’s 1968 neglected exterior mosaic from the facade of the Simion Stoilow Institute of Mathematics. The complexity of the project was given by challenging conditions in which we managed to secure access to the newly installed mosaic in the lobby of the bank hub. Two of our members had to infiltrate by taking up jobs as a receptionist and a security officer.

C: Was it worth the effort to extract the tiles from this particular mosaic?

N: I believe so. We even took our name from the Italian workshop which cut and installed the mosaic. It was a relevant project for us.

C: How about the name of the performance? Any connection to China Miéville’s book about the cities Besźel and Ul Qoma (Miéville 2009)?

N: Absolutely. That’s the reference. We have, on one hand, the city of the cultural elite, of the rich, of the upper social class, of those who have access to emancipatory contexts, and on the other, the city of the deprived social classes, of the poor, of the neglected. And we are, through context hacking, breaching from one city to the other. We are breaking the rules on how one should inhabit the crosshatched areas, the in-between spaces.

C: A metaphor on how social and cultural classes learned to ignore each other, although they share the same city, the same geographical space – just as the denizens of a city from the book have to unsee, to ignore or consciously erase from their mind the denizens, buildings, and events taking place in the other city.

N: Precisely. This is essentially Bourdieu’s view on how elite classes use culture to distinguish themselves and maintain their social dominance.

C: Right. How people with more cultural capital decide what aesthetic values constitute good taste. And how people with less cultural capital accept as legitimate the ruling-class definition of taste (communicated through the dominant ideology), and the consequent distinctions between high culture and low culture: “the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated aesthetic, which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics of the ruling class” (Bourdieu 1979).

N: And how this acceptance of dominant forms of taste is, in fact, a type of symbolic violence between social classes in defining and imposing norms of good taste. Cultural hegemony, again. We are taught our cultural tastes in childhood, so our taste in culture is internalised into our personality. We thus identify our origin in a given social class, which might or might not impede upward social mobility. We guide children to their places in their social class, and within the hierarchy of social classes, we teach them to distance themselves from the members of other social classes, just as the children in Miéville’s book were guided to their place in their city and to learn how to ignore the reality of the other city. We teach them cultural aversion towards the other social classes, as a feeling of “disgust, provoked by horror, or visceral intolerance (‘feeling sick’) of the [bad] tastes of others”. “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or be­trayed” (Bourdieu 1979).

Synecdoche came to replace allegory, and metonymy took the place of metaphor (Dobrenko 2020)

C: Is a mosaic the same mosaic if you replace one of its tiles? Several tiles? The designer is often not the one doing the cutting or installing, so does it matter if you replace some pieces, as long as you leave the design unchanged? I’m not asking whether the replication/reproduction of an entire mosaic is diminishing its value; we can leave Benjamin out of this.

N: It would have been a shame to arrive at the Thomas-the-Tank-Engine Paradox through Benjamin.

C: The what?

N: You know, when Thomas has to go for repairs at the Works, but he doesn’t enjoy it. “’It’s nice to feel mended again’, he said afterwards, ‘but they took so many of my old parts away and put new ones in, that I’m not sure whether I’m really me or another engine’” (Awdry, 1985).

C: Oh, Theseus’s Paradox!

N: I think we were meant to believe that Thomas had a soul. So I would rather go with Lem’s Paradox.

C: Another one that I am afraid I am not familiar with.

N: No, I’m sure you are with this one. Stanisław Lem first introduced it in the story Fourteenth Voyage from Star Diaries (Lem 1957). Some thirty years later, it was restated by Parfit as the teletransport paradox: If a person is somehow re-created, say by teletransportation, is the re-creation the same person? (Parfit 1984) But let’s not debate mereological essentialism. As far as I’m concerned, as a nonessentialist mathematician raised in the tradition of the Madhyamaka school, Anattā is floating on the Suññatā sea.

C: Is nonessentialism a consequence of having to work with abstraction in mathematics?

N: Not necessarily, although working with algebraic structures, classes of equivalences, and categories aligns with this view. But it doesn’t imply that changing mosaic tiles is irrelevant – it doesn’t reduce to isomorphism up to equivalence. I think this is in tune with both the form and ideology behind mosaics. I’d say that in this context, the totality of the socialist realist art is just as relevant.

C: Isn’t totality something that describes the aspirations of Stalinist art and architecture in particular, rather than socialist realist art in general?

N: I think it expands well beyond Stalinist art and architecture. I don’t think it ended there; it applies to soviet brutalism as well, at least in some parts. As Groys said, “the concern for totality and the unity of opposites, for the living paradox that opposes dead, logically functioning reason, has its roots not only deep within the Marxist dialectic but also in Byzantine Christianity. The synthesis between Hegelian German idealism and the tradition of Orthodox Christianity of Byzantine origin had dominated” our thinking for a long time (Groys 2003). But of course, it is easier to see how the concern for internally contradictory unity applied to art, because the logical conclusions derived from internal contradiction had a direct stylistic, aesthetic impact. The socialist realist architecture (and decorative art) is “simultaneously monotonous and fascinating. Constantly offering the image of the same collective effort, the same social ecstasy, the same internal paradox— and the same failure of the individual. Two things form the inner tension […]: the hope for the saving unity of opposites, in which the architect wishes to be contained, and the danger of standing out as different from this unity by fault of one’s own. This inner tension manifests itself in obsessive repetitions, and it is through these repetitions that it is made visible even to the outside observer” (Groys 2003). The artist striving for totality in their work, had to “relativize their own position” and “make themselves a medium for the unity of opposites” through their work. They could not position themselves “one-sidedly, oppose others, and fail to contribute to a reconciliation of contradictions, thus sharpening the contradiction, destroying the unity of socialism, and placing the whole right back in the condition of the bourgeois struggle — every person against every other person” (Groys 2003). The goal was to achieve perfect balance between awing and blending in. So whether it was this mosaic or another, this artist or another – that was irrelevant. Worrying about the identity of little tiles – that is absurd.

C: Would you consider that this relativisation of the position of the artist resonates with the context-hacking tenet that artists should refuse to become easily salable commodities by not meeting the art market demands in terms of recognizability and identifiability?

N: For sure, having “a precisely delimited and singularly differentiable trademark, which can be used to create demand for a personal style that can be exploited” helps to sell. The art market values “monothematic approaches, recurring motifs, and interrelationships between works that can stake easily graspable claims” (Friesinger 2013). So I think it’s at least ironic when an artist mbuilds their brand precisely through form and aesthetics borrowed from realist socialist art. And certainly unexpected: “socialist realism, moreover, feels free and independent of the potential consumer, since marketing conditions rule out the possibility that the ideology will not be bought” (Groys 1992).

The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity (Adorno 1997)

C: But couldn’t we see this gesture, which you label as ironic, as trying to implement Adorno’s solution to the problem of the artwork as a contradiction arising from capitalism? I mean the problem of autonomous art simultaneously being and not being a commodity, simultaneously being destroyed by and produced by capitalism. Couldn’t we interpret the gesture as an attempt to obtain art’s autonomy from commodification via a subversive mimesis of it? “Only by immersing its autonomy in society’s imagerie can art surmount the heteronomous market. Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alienated” (Adorno 1997). Because in a capitalist culture, the art that refuses commodification stays irrelevant, at most marginal, or at least in process of becoming commodified in the end. So maybe forcibly attributing autonomy to art would simply result in the failure of offering an alternative to commodity culture – through obscurity.

N: The old debate whether art should have an ideological or a critical function within capitalism. Of course, art is both the critique and the ideology of capitalism. And there is no resolution to this; it is a contradiction of capitalist culture that cannot be solved in its own terms. Yes, autonomous art is never just a product of capitalism – it’s an ideological product of capitalism. And equally, claiming to strive for complete autonomy would simply hide art’s creation from within commodity culture, or at most present autonomous art as a sort of inefficient compensation for the shortcomings of capitalist culture instead of offering a real alternative to it, as you said. Complete autonomy would limit its potential for critical engagement with society. But isn’t this ambivalence what Adorno was suggesting with his observation that “the absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity”? Art as ideology, as fetish, establishing its autonomy against commodification, despite being constituted by it. We’re not suggesting to completely ignore the intertwining of art and commodification, but to refuse to accept the capitalist view of having exchange-value as the only relevant value. And so let me doubt that there is anything subversive in the brand-building gesture we are analysing here. Where is the mimesis? I see only real commodification.

C: So you don’t think the artist was context hacking?

N: I don’t.

C: But you must admit that it would have been a great example of cultural hacking. It had several good premises. It is, essentially, a trojan horse, bringing socialist realist art into the heart of capitalist institutions, and serving the elite the culture of masses. To which we also add the historical context of the building hosting it.

N: Yes, but we shouldn’t forget that “socialist realism was not created by the masses, but formulated in their name by well-educated and experienced elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the internal logic of the avant-garde method itself, which had nothing to do with the actual tastes and demands of the masses” (Groys 1992). So the elite is getting back its elite culture previously sold as mass culture.

C: It’s true, but Groys also wrote that “the art of socialist realism has already bridged the gap be­tween elitism and kitsch by making visual kitsch the vehicle of elitist ideas, a combination that many in the West even today regard as the ideal union of seriousness and accessibility” (Groys 1992). So there is a subversive potential in terms of accessibility.  

N: Not the best hack to lock up a beautiful mosaic in a private institution, accessible just for the chosen few. And even if there was indeed a radical intention behind this artwork, we shouldn’t forget that context hacking should be sometimes hacked as well: “Conversely, the hacker scene itself is a context that must be hacked, for instance in order to confront it with theoretical principles that can break open the ideological fetishization […], and upset the comfort of the warm nest” (Friesinger 2013).

C: You just said that it wouldn’t be “the best hack to lock up a beautiful mosaic”. So you like the artwork?

N: Absolutely. It’s splendid.