Photo exhibition documents communist-era student life, events at iconic club in Bucharest

Archimagini Club A, a photo exhibition centered on Bucharest's Club A, a landmark venue for the young, alternative culture in the decades of communism, is scheduled to open next month at Arcub – Hanul Gabroveni in Bucharest.

The exhibition, with photos taken by architect Mirel Leventer, documents the student life at the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest and the events that took place in Club A between 1969 and 1983.

The architect's collection of photographs and films is a rich archive of images from Club A's heyday – between 1969 and 1989 - when it functioned as a (semi)clandestine and exclusive club, founded and managed by the students of the Bucharest Institute of Architecture, today the Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism.

The exhibition places the cultural events organized in Club A in the local context of the Romanian political events of the 1970s but also in the international one. For instance, in 1969, the year the Woodstock festival was held, Club A hosted its first large-scale event, the Pop and Folk Music Festival.

"Club A was an oasis of freedom created in a basement in the historic center of the communist-era capital with the aim of organizing shows, debates, and concerts that would constitute an alternative to the officially promoted culture, and offer young people a place to behave as if they were free," a description of the exhibition explains.

The opening of the exhibition will also mark the launch of the photo album Archimagini and of a documentary film edited from the video images recovered from 16 mm reels from the architect's personal archive.

Mirel Leventer graduated from the Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture in Bucharest in 1975. Between 1985 and 1993, he lived in Israel. He currently holds dual citizenship, Romanian and Israeli. As an architect, he worked on several large-scale construction projects, both in the country and abroad, many of them in Israel.

He is a member of Club A in Bucharest and was the coordinator of its film club between 1970 and 1975, while he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture.

His interests include advertising, video production, mountaineering, travel, and film history. "I've been taking pictures since high school, since the eighth grade even. So somehow, I've always loved taking photos. When I was in high school, I took part in many student photo exhibitions. Back then, photography clubs were small amateur institutions where we learned to work with a camera. We had a coordinator, who, in our case, was the physics teacher. […] I would say that it was there that the 'first seeds' of a passion were planted," he explains.