CURRENT PROJECTS
#CLEANWATERS Artistic Residency, 2024
Open Call: 15 May - 15 June 2024
online
Artistic Residency: 12 - 26 September 2024
Sulina, the Danube Delta, Romania
We’re very excited to announce the open call for the 1st Clean Waters Artistic Residency which will take place between 12 and 26 of September 2024 in Sulina, the Danube Delta, Romania. The call is free and open for artists & researchers living in Romania / Moldova / Ukraine / Bulgaria / Serbia / Croatia / Slovakia / Hungary / Austria / Germany, focusing on practices or themes related to water ecologies, the Danube and the impact of plastic pollution on these ecologies.
The project aims to connect 10 professionals around the Danube for a 12 days artistic residency that explores the generative potential of art and collectivity in reinventing the ways we connect to the environment.
The residency involves living in a shared house, cooking together with local resources and sharing meals, but also getting to know the small town of Sulina, its inhabitants and the incredible biodiversity and challenges in the Danube Delta. The working process is imagined as an exchange of knowledge(s) and practices between participants working with different mediums, that will lead to producing works of art and ideas that will be further shared through exhibitions with the communities living on the Danube river in Romania. Transport, accommodation, meals, artist grants will be covered.
The #CleanWaters Artistic Residency, coordinated by MaiMultVerde and Matka, is part of the Clean Waters program, launched in 2019 with the support of Lidl Romania as a call for involvement in combating and preventing water pollution with plastic, addressed to members of the communities and public authorities in the localities along the Danube.
PAST PROJECTS
HOW TO TRUST A SIMULATION?, 2023
27 September - 15 October 2023
"Dimitrie Leonida" Technical Museum, Bucharest
Artists: Nicoleta Mureș, Mihaela Vasiliu, Ciprian Ciuclea, Adrian Ganea, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Flaviu Rogojan, Lucia Ghegu, Andrei Arion, Ana Avram
How To Trust A Simulation? started from the endless possibilities offered by simulation processes, which can address a wide range of concerns and diverse directions. When we imagine the future, our expectations of the world are based on known histories and records. But when these are built on the dissimulation of violence, how do we deconstruct memories and histories? We know that a story told from person to person becomes subjective to each narrator and changes over time. However, stories often seem to resemble each other and reveal multiple geographies haunted by the ghosts of unwritten histories. What we know is a collage of memories, aspirations, and glimpses of personal truths, passed through the filter of selective cultural politics.
In a present programmed by marketing algorithms, impulses become automatic. The new habits generated by technological progress produce a sense of comfort and detachment, while the endless flow of information creates confusion and exhaustion. In the chaos of conflicting sensations, the impression of unprecedented digitally mediated connection is matched by that of isolation and failure. In the background, the sciences announce the danger of global warming, the sixth mass extinction, and pave the way for the colonization of other planets as a fallback. A change of perspective seems necessary in this context: a redefinition of the intentions and relationships that guide us in the world, based on the intuition of a precariousness that characterizes existence. In such a framework, how do we write our histories, and what responsibility do we have for those we forget? Technology is an extraordinary tool for archiving the present and preserving much-needed information for researchers and analysts of the future, but how do we plan to program it to avoid the neoliberal logic of productivity and consumption and to find a middle way between analogue methods and complete mechanization?
Curators: Georgia Țidorescu, Lea Rasovszky, Michelle Panthère
BEYOND ME IS US, 2023
2-15 August 2023
Anexa Matka, Cornetu, IF
Beyond Me Is Us was an artistic residency program based on cooperation and knowledge exchange between two artist collectives: L1 Studios (Bucharest, RO) and Drujba Collective (Chișinău, MD). Combining a large area of perspectives and techniques, the program focused on slow & diy practices as a form to deviate from the norms of turbo-capitalism, as well as on exploring possibilities of living and being together. Divided between collective and personal time, the program included a variety of workshops starting from screen printing, sewing, sound, listening to writing, collage and self-publishing methods following the samiszdat model. Sleeping in common rooms, in tents or hammocks in the garden of the house, cooking and eating together, exchanging opinions, feelings, passing thoughts or self-care tricks made space for the self and the other in another kind of allyship. From using at-hand and local resources to practicing ways of sharing (care, knowledge, skill), another sort of economy grew.
Artists: Anca Dima, Adriana Preda, Katian Velea, Otto Constantin, Miruna Radovici, Ecaterina Samonii, Maxim Poleacov, ruben hollinger, Kristina Jacot, Andrei Morari.
Extra Guides: Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Alin Cincă, Aron Madon / Admina.
Kajet Kornet is the result of the two-weeks exercise on cohabitation, sharing food, space, resources, work, thoughts, knowledge & skills and of dreaming of other ways of collectively organizing, while dismantling borders through the dissolution of authorship.
KARAOKE ROOM, 2023
27-28 May 2023
Atelierele Malmaison, Bucharest
An intervention during the Open Doors IV event at Atelierele Malmaison, Karaoke Room transformed Michelle's former 20 sqm studio on the 1st floor of Malmaison into an open performance space. Set up as an interactive karaoke installation disrupting the regular visiting experience of the event, it created a safe & playful space for relieving social anxieties related to public performing. By welcoming both visiting public and artists exhibiting, the installation made new solidarities form and erased older boundaries between the two categories through simple things like sharing favorite songs or guilty pleasures.
THE BITTERSWEET CHAOS OF BECOMING, 2022
15-29 July 2022
Letea village, Tulcea
10-30 November 2022
Ivan Gallery, Bucharest
Artists: Anca Bucur, Dan Beudean, Adrian Ganea, Thea Lazăr, Marta Mattioli, Nicoleta Mureș, Adrian Preda, Lea Rasovszky + Andrei Arion, Flaviu Rogojan, Sillyconductor, Mihaela Vasiliu
There must be some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living that will leave traces in the world (Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto).
How do we think with others and how do we approach that which is not us, human and non-human alike? How do we co-exist and co-evolve with other species? We have always been part of a collective mesh, far beyond just human, as the shadow of calamity reflects now in the visibly failed social contracts, the effects of ecological collapse, and the feeling of exhaustion. But is that all there is? Or are there other delicate touches and dormant memories waiting to blossom, to envelop us in more organic, sensitive bonds? Can we restore a feeling of hope perhaps?
We think of co-evolving from within the porosity of our bodies. From the multiple interdependencies that constitute our being and the world itself. To think from within this porosity enlivens ways of imagining non-hierarchical arrangements of the social realities. It unfetters vulnerabilities and unfolds a more-than-human perception of the world. We can’t afford the hubristic attitude that has hindered sensing in the ongrowing capitalist system, creating histories of violence, and leaving deep scars in bodies and landscapes. But we can’t romanticize either a newfound connection with nature, a retreat like escapism.
Yet, to create other porous bonds, to imagine how it all connects, we need as well something like dignity with and towards others. And a slower rhythm, as another way of being in time, another way of growth, of looking, feeling, and understanding togetherness, the companions we’ve made. That’s maybe the closest way to express the sensibility of what we leave as touches of us.
Thinking with the artists in the exhibition, we allowed ourselves this slowing down and let a rather tentacular thinking take over, exploring the sensibilities that could connect us and the differences which bring something of ourselves into exercises of imagination. Just like an octopus, in love and dizzying, we stumble and re-emerge, malleable, slippery, soft, and at times uncomfortable. So, what if we let this lumpy exercise of coexistence with that we don’t fully understand grow into a practice that might replace the myths that separate us? After all, love is a practice of making space for others within. What kind of stories would we tell if we imagined ourselves as beings-in-love?
Transformations are inevitable. But in the fluctuations of becoming there’s a bittersweet chaos, you just have to give in.
Flow of thoughts by Michelle Panthère & Edith Lázár
The exhibition was part of the imaginative context I Believe in the Continuous Evolution of Species. an exercise on non-anthropocentric thinking - proposed by Michelle, and further developed with Edith. And was a follow-up to a summer residency in the Letea village of Danube Delta during July, envisioned as an exchange between artists and curators.
HOW SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT QUEER CULTURE?, 2021-2022
september 2021-march 2022
Bucharest: Atelierele Malmaison, Goethe-Institut, Suprainfinit Gallery, SwitchLab, Combinatul Fondului Plastic
Cluj: Tranzit House
Timișoara: Kunsthalle Bega
online
What kind of institution could encompass the endless possibilities of queer? A multidisciplinary educational program collateral to the project Triumf Amiria. The Museum of Queer Culture[?] of MozaiQ LGBT NGO, How Should We Talk About Queer Culture?, aimed at creating (safer) space(s) for the many local queer perspectives as well as more understanding of the queer experience nationally. Exploring the contemporary notion of queer, as it is thought of by theorists today, expanded the research on sexuality and gender to related issues on race, class, ability and neurodivergence. On the occasion of 20 years since the decriminalization of same-sex relationships in Romania, the program navigated local histories and practices and foreign approaches in order to shape its own queer embodiment.
The program included a series of workshops, talks, screenings, public and group readings, research, performances, concerts and parties.
Artists: Jasmina Al-Qaisi and Raj-Alexandru Udrea, Vera Hofmann, Sofia Zadar, Göksu Kunak, Hyenaz, Nóra Ugron, Paul Dunca/Paula Dunker, Alex Mirutziu, Adriana Chiruță, Patrick Brăila, Apparatus 22, Billie Rose, Luca Istodor
Collectives: Cenaclul X, Corp. Platform, Queer Night, 2 Pupeze Negre, CUTRA, The Queer Vegan Community, Free Pages
Housing / Displacement,
2021
Amid real estate development and the big festivals in Cluj, some of the city's inhabitants live on the edge of subsistence in a neighbourhood created by the Cluj-Napoca Municipality in 2001 next to the Pata Rât city dump. For 20 years, more than 700 people have been waiting for the Romanian authorities to fulfil their obligations and relocate them in decent conditions. But living in Cluj is becoming increasingly expensive, and plans for a metro or train line to the airport to make it easier for tourists and workers to get in and out of the city seem more important than the lives of people living in Pata. The capitalist machinery makes no exceptions: only capital makes a safe shelter.
Maria Stoica, a resident and Roma activist living on Cantonului street in Pata Rât talks about the violence and discrimination she faced coming from a marginalized environment. More than the issue of housing, the interview touches on issues of privilege, ethnicity, gender, access to work and social services and the need for solidarity and support from the authorities and the wider community.
Housing / Displacement (Locuiri / Dislocare) was an exercise within the multidisciplinary performing arts workshop Healing Portraits, coordinated by Eugen Jebeleanu and organized by Focus Atelier Cluj together with Casa Tranzit. Based on an interview with Maria Stoica conducted by Mihaela Cîrjan - 07 September 2021.
The video is part of the short film "Locuiri", made with Juan-Jose Almarza, Adriana Creanga and Attila Godri.
Rezidența21,
2020-ongoing
A platform for independent music and sound fostering the development of the local scene through production & DJing workshops, events and artistic residencies. The platform is also a space for experimenting with different formats and spaces for the events it hosts, growing in collaboration with the residents according to their research and practice interests. Sometimes it acts like a label, releasing digital LPs/EPs or diy videos for the music produced during the artistic residencies - you'll probably find Rezidența21 on all streaming platforms.
Artists in residence:
2022, Letea, Danube Delta: #Fluid, Admina, Sofia Zadar, +SHE+, ricky horror, Suce Fraga, Chlorys, p1ne tree, Dasha Druje, Borusiade, Aleksandra Sakara, Brașov
2020, Richiș, Sibiu / Letea, Danube Delta: Brașov, Sagan Ummo and Andy Tziouras, Poetrip, Simina Oprescu, Diana Miron, Sillyconductor, Corp. Platform
Artists in training: Tudor Petruțiu, ASMR, Julio Elvsey, Costin Duțu, Cristiana Achim, Roxana Ardeleanu, Aldessa, Patrick Brăila, Octavia, Raj-Alexandru Udrea, Gheordu, una.
Volunteering artists: Laurențiu Coțac, Kalimotxo, Glitchgirl