Approaching the painting medium as a ‘culture of memory’ medium, Lucian Brumă proposes a series of pictural representations that function as instruments of maintaining and consolidating the Holocaust memory. The archive of sufferance, the topography of trauma and the index of witnesses – explored here as artistic methodologies of work – are also constituted as metaphors instrumented in a medium of remembrance: the painting. In this respect, the works of Lucian Brumă – as witnesses of an unlived life – talk about our recent Romanian anti-Semitism, inspired by the coresponding European ideology, that led to the expropriation, deportation and extermination of thousands Romanian citizens of Jewish ethnicity.

The memorial paradigm in which the archaeologies of social life are constituted is based on the local history, that implies a discursive formation of identity – as a consequence of experiencing the trauma –, each individual experience contributing to the complex stratification of social life, whose organicity constitutes the study topic of the social archaeology. In this respect, Lucian Brumă’s works talk about the 1941’s Pogrom in Iaşi with its coresponding local trauma, when over 13 000 Jews were murdered during an action of ethnical cleansing by Antonescu’s political regime, known as “The Cleaning of the Field”.

The unlived lives of those peoples – culturally, socially, and economically marginalized; deprived of identity, propriety, and liberty; deceived by a State that reconsidered its own constitutional obligation referring to the equality of rights for minorities; terrorized, mutilated, locked in freight trains in which they died of hunger, thirst, and dysentery; deported in Transnistria and Kazakhstan, sent in concentration camps, subjected to humiliations and anti-Semitic atrocities, ending by being massacred and sold, later on, in times of communist regime – subsist through us, and resist as a lesson for humanity.