Lost Chapters - Victoria Viprada

Lost Chapters is the nostalgic journey through Chisinau captured by the moldavian visual artist Victoria Viprada. In this poetic stroll she invites a viewer to look through the windows of the past, while experiencing the frustration, reflections and questions without answers. It is completed by a poem of the poet and philosopher Alex Cosmescu, who is just like Victoria reminiscing on their hometown’s past. This publication embodies ephemerality and evanescence that are the nature of human memories.

„I must admit that this little photography book amazed me: like the great Italo Calvino’s “The Nonexistent Knight”, it is the documentary of a city that insists on sometimes showing its armors, its distinction, but is almost totally missing. It is the incarnation of chapters from a book that was, once, masterly written, but whose pages, a lot of them, become ever whiter, ever more faded, ever more invisible; though I recognize places, walls, abandoned buildings, streets, it is as if I saw shadows, pieces of sky, arcades, blind facades, and some of Victoria Viprada’s photographs conserve even just a bit of the former building of the private gymnasium for girls whose tutor was and will always be Baroness Iulia A. von Geyking, a well-known public person of the 1890s-1900s Chisinau elite. Heavy clouds are gathering for a long time already over this architectural testimony, and, just as I decided, around 2007-2009, to take detailed photographs myself from as many angles it was possible, the author of this wonderful publication is bringing into actuality the memory of the city from which many past elements disappeared, especially during the last 15 years, but her photographs conserve them – as spirit & atmosphere – in the pages of this book-object, in black and white!

What is wonderful is that LOST CHAPTERS is not just a beautiful book, but it comes before us as a veridical and credible document, as an ethical and moral testimony, using the forms and instruments of photographic art in order to account for what can memory mean today (and maybe tomorrow!), what does the inexorable passage of time mean, what is permanence, and what is finally doomed to perishability, evanescence, alteration, death...”

Vladimir Bulat, April, 2023, Bucharest