The artistic and curatorial endeavour entitled ‘This is not an exhibition’ subversively uses strategies to subcontract and redistribute artwork specific to decentralized post-industrial capitalism, while transforming the usual process of research, production and individual artistic exhibition into a collective work of production and redistribution of knowledge. First, the artist was invested with curatorial authority. In turn, the artist Dan Acostioaei agreed to share the allocated exhibition space, as well as the attention capital thus obtained, inviting to participate in the exhibition cultural workers – vertical site (Livia Pancu + Florin Bobu), Andreea Cioara and Andrei Timofte – who addressed topics similar to the research that Acostioaei undertook on architectural decorative ceramics produced during the communist period, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. These concerns fall within his activity as a teacher in the Mural Art Department within the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design in Iași, which Acostioaei expands in the exhibition understood not only as an archive, but also as an open and continuous workshop.

Through these series of gestures aimed at radically redefining the artistic endeavour as a collective educational process, the topics of the exhibition move from the aesthetics of socialist modernism and socialist architecture, combined with the memory of industrial production processes during the communist period, to institutional, cultural and economic frameworks which facilitates the commodification and extraction of added value and symbolic capital from the process of artistic research and knowledge. According to the artist, “artistic research becomes a form of exploitation as «artistic extraction», a term that also refers to a process of restoration of works of art that is applied when what is visible, be it the paint layer or a bas-relief or a mural, is extracted from the support area if it is much too damaged. Each of those present at the exhibition operates or has operated such extractions of symbolic capital. The socialist project is, in turn, incorporated by the market.