In 1995 the same flag escorted a mixed crowd of citizens to the place of burial of a Barbie doll with a missing leg, which Mark had found in the streets of the city and whom he decided to give a public funeral. Back then it was Mark who shouldered the green banner, marching through the streets of Chișinău followed by a few devotees carrying a tiny red coffin with the desecrated body of the iconic American product. The flag carrier and the bearers were escorted by a small public for new art, a loud police brass band playing military and funeral marches, and by a growing crowd of disconcerted civilians. As the procession processed, more and more bystanders and passerby joined the bizarre ceremony. Those of us involved in the organization of the Exodus (including the local sage Albert Șvets) remember the event too well, as it led to the enlightenment and salvation of a few who since then call themselves “contemporary artists,” and to the profound confusion of many ex-socialist citizens and policemen, who have remained for three decades now a baffled audience of new art and free-market postsocialism. The culmination of that liturgy came at the end, when Mark was putting the tiny coffin containing the one-legged doll into the ground. As the police orchestra was delivering its most mournful Soviet funeral hymn, a heavy storm suddenly broke the sky, washing away the entire ceremony (including the tables laid with food and drinks under the open air by the local Soros foundation’s art and culture program for all of those who came to commemorate the “departed,” as per the local Christian Orthodox tradition). It was, after all, the Son of Rain.
Barbie's Funeral: Exodus
Chisinau 1995, (Art and Culture Program, Open Society Institute Moldova)
Mark Verlan's Flag