General area of interest: LIMES temporary exhibition
Specific area of interest: general concept of reconstitution (the battle bow in the Roman army)
Objective: reconstructing the body of a battle bow in 8 chapters
Museum curators: Ioana Gruiță, Monica Gui

What do we need art for?

I guess because it is an essential space of reflection which is needed as much as other fields of practice, and that should evolve alongside. Speaking from my own perspective, there was always a need to question different mechanisms of the immediate reality surrounding me, and find ways to reconfigure it somehow.

About my experience/contribution within the frame of Historia-Hysteria project

This year I was invited by Răzvan Anton and Mihai Iepure Gorski from Fabrica de Pensule, to work with a collection from the National Museum of Transylvanian History in Cluj. By the time we had to embark on the project the pandemic happened and like many other art residencies it was moved to the online space. Since the initial set up of the project reshaped and this shift occurred, I decided not to reveal the image of the chosen object from the museum exhibition: the reconstruction of a battle bow, but rather to use the medium of text where each body part of the bow will represent a following chapter.

I would like to thank Ioana Gruiță and Monica Gui, the museum curators who provided me with all the necessary information in order to comprehend better how the bow was reconstituted and build up the text.

Where I am (situated) right now (it could be artistically, geographically or both)

“- Your new collection, coming out in October, is called “Geography III”. Why?

– I think of a remark of W.H. Auden in “Journal to a War”, which I am unable to quote, but which says, more or less, that if we could travel as fast as light, geography should be by far the most important thing to us.

– And that III?

– I like threes.”

I’m in Bucharest at the moment, in a waiting room, but my mind bridges towards the places where I would like to travel as soon as we will be allowed to. Until then, I keep close to one of my favorite poetry books, Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop. 

Most of my personal works come from intuition and curiosity, the same way I choose the bow as an object from the exhibition of the National Museum of Transylvanian History. Then it can take quite a while for a project to become tangible in a certain format. I’m not in a hurry, so I try taking my time. As the previous project usually generates the next one, while working my current long-term project A Brief Selection of World’s Memory, – the most complex in terms of nuances and possibilities to approach it and probably closest to my heart from anything I did before, I’ve been thinking more seriously about bringing together art and investigative journalism in my practice.