The Solemn Process (1964-2008) is a strange name for a social practice work. Evoking gravity and levity, solemn is not usually a word we use for participatory art. Yet, it is the title for Ana Lupaș's installation on display in the Tate Modern's Performer and Participant galleries. Upon entering the room where the work is exhibited, we are met with metal biomorphic structures occupying the gallery floor. They look rather strange at first: odd shapes in steel, minimalist yet with a textured surface whose seams serve as an index of their fabrication. Most of all, the pack embodies a sombre quietness. Only when we take our eyes from the floor to the gallery walls can we see the shapes' former condition: haystacks constructed between 1964 and 1974 in rural Transylvania as a social practice project initiated by Lupaș.

Composed as a large grid, the vinyl prints on the wall show sepia photographs of villagers in the acts of producing, posing, and interacting with Lupaș's stacks, quite unlike the steel structures in the gallery. Constructed of clay and straw, they appear dynamically textured with ears of wheat like hedgehogs, embodiments of living matter. Here, the works are situated in barns and fields, and the images document not only the objects' physical forms but also their collective effort of production, locating the works in a long Transylvanian tradition of sculpting haystacks into imaginative shapes.

An image depicts three women of different generations alongside a haystack. They stand proudly with their work, the physical overlap of their bodies with the structure suggests collective ownership and evokes its haptic means of production. As such, the image echoes the ritual as an exercise that strengthens the communal bonds between its makers. Lupaș’s shadow appears as a spectre in the lower edge, indicating the presence of the artist in the project, but ultimately acknowledging its labour to the peasants.  Another image shows an intergenerational group on a field against the village landscape. The haystack is only glimpsed in the top left, although the idea of it is observed in the bouquet of wheat held by the elderly woman on the left, the presence of raw material indicating the transformation made possible through the hands that hold them. While the pre-industrial practice is now less common due to the mechanisation of agriculture, it has benefits from ‘[maintaining] the biological genepool’ to being a collective ritual that brings a community together.[1] Lupaș’s shadow appears as a spectre in the lower edge, indicating the presence of the artist in the project, but ultimately acknowledging its labour to the peasants.

Lupaș’s practice stretches across photography, textile, and social practice in producing conceptual works that engage with tradition and everyday gestures. Her work such as Humid Installation (1970), a social practice piece where the artist examines ideas of domestic labour through the simple gesture of hanging white laundry, becomes a means to understanding changing traditions under Romanian land collectivisation which moved ownership in rural areas from peasants to the state.[2] Like The Solemn Process, this work has transformed over time, reiterated to produce a new set of relations between gesture and environment. Initiated between 1964 and 1974, The Solemn Process was supposed to continue indefinitely but was cut short by the Romanian rural systematisation program enacted in 1974 by Nicolae Ceaușescu's regime. The program aimed to urbanise rural areas and transform peasant communities into workers, sometimes by erasing less developed villages to give space to state-owned farmland and collective housing. It also aimed to disrupt 'the traditional socio-economic structures of the villages and improve political-ideological and managerial control of the peasant population.’[3] As people left for cities and villages were erased, peasant traditions like these risked extinction. In this way, Lupaș's work engages with the idea that, like language, the collective memory stored in ritual is lost when no one can practise it.      


This transition is present in the juxtaposition between the feathery forms in the images and the stiff metal objects in the gallery. While the shape remains the same, the structures have been encapsulated in steel, through a process of conservation where Lupaș enlisted metalsmiths to produce cases for the wreaths. Interestingly, haystacks are themselves a form of conservation to preserve fodder for colder months. Lupaș's encapsulation, the determination to conserve the work, shows perseverance to breathe life into local traditions despite societal change threatening their extinction. The steel shields, making them enduring structures, albeit temporarily. Eventually their surfaces will rust and the shiny exterior crumble; Protection against the passing of history, it seems, is a futile illusion.

The work's material transformation shares similarities with the Tate Modern, where it is on display. The institution is housed in the former Bankside Power Station, which closed its operations in the 1970s after being found too uneconomic and polluting to keep operating.[4] Formally, the work's post-industrial nature resembles the architecture of the power station, and their similar transitions away from being means of production prompts reflection; Lupaș’s structures isolated in encapsulation and the power station vacated of its original function.

The objects become time capsules, containers of memory and labour, of both the participants and the loss of peasant culture in Transylvania during Ceaușescu's regime. Yet, situated in their new armour, the original composition becomes estranged from reality. They are now grey and cold, no longer simply light and feathery creations of organic matter. Protection also brings about distance. This act truly is a ‘solemn process’, the title initially referencing the traditional term for making haystacks, but here also reflects a desire to conserve what time has already transformed. The opaque metal makes the structures inaccessible, the seams that occupy the surfaces an index of the metamorphosis leading to this isolated state.

Similarly, a move from rural to institution also generates a loss of spatial poetics. Clinical and cold, the white cube has replaced the picturesque countryside, and the fence guarding the works force us to contemplate their quiet existence from a distance, like a family of odd monuments huddled in a corner. Yet, the transformation of The Solemn Process exemplifies how remembering can take many different shapes, the meaning of objects and sometimes their very structure unfixed and moulding over time, responding to new social and physical environments as history unfolds. Still, I leave the gallery longing, with a foolish nostalgia perhaps, to feel the smell of hay, the sound of chatter, and while walking under an open sky to encounter Lupaș's stacks with ears of wheat stuck in my feet.

[1] Mechtild Widrich. 2022. ‘From Rags to Monuments: Ana Lupaş’s Humid Installation.’ ARTMargins. January 11, 2022. https://artmargins.com/from-rags-to-monuments-ana-lupass-humid-installation/, accessed 24 May 2024.

[2] Jana Špulerová, et al. 2019. ‘Past, Present and Future of Hay-making Structures in Europe,’ Sustainability 11, no. 20: 5581. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/20/5581

[3] Wim van Meurs. 1999. ‘Land Reform in Romania – A Never-Ending Story,’ South-East Europe Review for Labour and Social Affairs 2 (2): 115. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43291789

[4] Murray, Stephen. “The Battle for Bankside: Electricity, Politics and the Plans for Post-War London.” Urban History 45, no. 4 (2018): 616–634. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926817000591.