Aga Łuczakowska’s Self-Published Book Râsu’-plânsu’ Meditates on Ceaușescu’s Bucharest

Aga Łuczakowska has self-published Râsu’-plânsu’, a 60-page softback priced at €30 that reflects on the legacy of former Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu through fragments of Bucharest’s built environment. The title comes from a Romanian phrase meaning ‘laughing through tears’, which the book treats less as historical explanation than as an invitation to read place, memory and the traces people leave behind. The project draws on a decade in which Łuczakowska lived in Bucharest, photographing the city on her way to work and at weekends; her black-and-white images avoid a comprehensive account of Ceaușescu’s programme of forced relocation and urbanisation, focusing instead on the persistence of older memories and personal histories. A floral blanket on a washing line, with its pattern evoking folk tradition and a rural imagination, sits against the geometry of brutalist modernity, while domestic bric-a-brac, boxes and broken metalwork recur as objects both lost and preserved. The book’s power, the review argues, lies in intimacy rather than scale or completeness, asking viewers to slow down and register how memory, identity and resilience survive in spaces designed to transform them. Łuczakowska has extended the project through Râsu’-plânsu’ Interventions, inviting other artists to add drawings or pages, or to cut into existing images, a decentralisation of authorship described as anti-authoritarian in spirit.