ELECTORAL MEETING (Romania, 1975)
In communist Romania state-managed electoral meetings were the order of the day. Under the oversight of the feared secret police citizens had to testify to their adherence to the regime. Ion Grigorescu secretly photographed one of these meetings, organised on March 6, 1975. The results are especially revealing of the mechanism behind these demonstrations. The combination of the crowd, bewildered but docile, and the individual members of the secret police, created an absurd spectacle, lacking every form of spontaneity. These senseless and mechanical actions had no other purpose than to be a setting for role playing, imposed by a system of discrete but ruthless oppression.
