Muscle Memory

Hunger Circuses, by name, because of how they appeared, were large buildings constructed in Communist Romania as hubs intended to feed the populace. Two were completed when Ceaușescu was executed in 1989, and several others were unfinished - silent witnesses to a hollowed promise. Over the following years, the buildings were either repurposed or demolished. Muscle Memory provides a contemporary image of one such structure, the surviving Hunger Circus in Pantelimon, now a public market. The image is printed on thin slices of meat. The number of slices match the monthly ration given to a family of three under the regime. Here, the monumentality of the structure and the vulnerability of the medium are combined, evoking history's gravity and the memory of hunger.