Carmen Dobre

In 2008, a dingy, decrepit and nuclear-proof underground theme park opened near Vilnius. This is the setting for Consuming History, a photographic series by Carmen Dobre for the Romanian Pavilion, about a Soviet bunker in which people are interrogated, only by actors. Photographing the visitors, Dobre explores tensions between reality and fiction. The reenactments sit somewhere between the theatrical and historical — this is an actual Soviet bunker built in 1984 and some of the guards are ex-KGB officers, but the experience is dramatised. Are history and fiction, therefore, inseparable?