Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti was a semi-professional radio station, a radio-amplification station that only broadcast via loudspeakers within the bounds of the Costineşti resort. Due to its limited audience, the programmes could be broadcast without prior censorship, as the routine procedure in a “normal” radio station required. While all radio programmes in communist Romania were prerecorded in order to get approval for broadcast, all Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti programmes were live.

Its first broadcasts began in 1979, but those that gave shape to this phenomenon began to be transmitted regularly starting in the summers of 1981 and 1982. Initially, it operated in an improvised form, in a doughnut shop, with two tape recorders, and a microphone within a space of 1 metre by 1.5 metres. Thus, the first broadcasts could be heard within a radius of a few dozen metres. In its heyday, the loudspeakers of Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti were mounted on around 100 posts, and its broadcasts could be heard practically everywhere in the resort.

The Andrei Partoş–Radio Vacanţa-Costineşti Private Collection includes photographs, publications, and various documents regarding a (semi)clandestine seasonal radio station that operated during the summer holiday period in Costineşti, which was officially and popularly considered to be the seaside resort for young people. This radio station and its associated activities in Costineşti constituted a social phenomenon without comparison in the Romania of the 1980s, an epitome of the alternative culture of the younger generation under later Romanian communism and a formative experience for the generation who supports the democratic consolidation in present day Romania.

Květa Fulierová Private Collection, Bratislava, Slovakia. Courtesy: Květa Fulierová

Július Koller (1939 – 2007), a prominent and internationally renowned Slovak conceptual artist, found original ways to communicate the absurdity he experienced every day in socialist Czechoslovakia. His text cards, which he sent to his friends and acquaintances, are a playful and ironic reaction to the circumstances of the time. Through a simple verbal and visual form (e.g. the question mark) he commented on the then-current situation in arts and culture (e.g. Idea, Concept: Socialist Image; The Artistic of Form of the Message). The motif of the question mark is a symbol of Kollerʼs ceaseless questioning of dogmatic truths. In his works, the mystery, the secret, and the fascination with the unknown mingle with absurdity. He used the U.F.O. abbreviation and assigned various words to it (Utopian Fantastic Object; Universal Fantastic Question Mark). Kollerʼs interest in fiction and his fascination with the mysterious are also a form of intellectual play and an escape from everyday worries. His artistic attitude does not harbour illusion; he connected art with lived experience.