Self-made traps
There are traps like cages that we create around us, where we are free to enter or leave, which we can bypass, or turn into our comfort zone. The aim of this project is to investigate both the personal space and space negotiations in the relations with others. I am interested in people’s need to create a comfort zone in various situations and settings where we need to interact and relate both to the space we are in and to other people.
A metaphor of capture and containment, the traps embody various scenarios. Therefore they are false traps, anyone is free to come in or out of them, space delimitation is fictitious, role-playings are interwoven, positions constantly revised, to the point where the captured is the capturer, the routes and directions of crossing the space are intuitively chosen.
Self-made traps
There are traps like cages that we create around us, where we are free to enter or leave, which we can bypass, or turn into our comfort zone. The aim of this project is to investigate both the personal space and space negotiations in the relations with others. I am interested in people’s need to create a comfort zone in various situations and settings where we need to interact and relate both to the space we are in and to other people.
A metaphor of capture and containment, the traps embody various scenarios. Therefore they are false traps, anyone is free to come in or out of them, space delimitation is fictitious, role-playings are interwoven, positions constantly revised, to the point where the captured is the capturer, the routes and directions of crossing the space are intuitively chosen.
Post-world Undercover Guerrilla Fake Rock Manufacturing Facility - collaboration -
Is it the end or the beginning of the world? Does it even matter? In his makeshift undercover fake-rock manufacturing plant installation, Sebastian Moldovan does away with evidence of historical linearities and instead subtracts from our reality just enough recognizable details of an alternative society rebuilding the now, one hollow rock at a time. The installation is made in collaboration with artists Lucia Ghegu and Albert Kaan, adding works that inhabit the space, building a collective approach beyond the authorial. We are now in the post-sublime nature, in its perfect simulacrum, reality anew.
A lost or emergent civilization is busy with producing and reproducing the archives of our worlds combined - boulders, rocks, stones. Shaped by cultural beliefs and human hands in the idealized forms of building blocks, stones are resistant to the many histories humans have tried to encapsulate in them - the theological technological. Rocks/sand/glass/plants, organized and reorganized into matter in a cycle of slow deterioration, of permanent stabilization or rapid disappearance.
This a mineral language, before symbolic characters, before cursed rosetta stones of mistranslations. Isn't it better that nuclear facilities use only visual warnings? We are translating in deep time, where and when language is just a temporary spike, civilizations running fast through the streams, only radiation remaining imminent.
We are surrounded by manifestos, since the art world above all worlds delights in indulging in fake rocks with exchanged meanings. But it also gives us the chance of a place beyond all meanings, entanglements of an in-situ we might just as well dream together. We gathered detritus of everyday life bits and memorabilia, internet cables and lost loved artifacts, mashed up together in the wonders of plastiglomerates. And then there is this quiet anger in these hollow rocks, how did we already end up in a nature-tamed greenhouse, changing the composition of our oceans, collecting dead reefs, building islands and shelters, throwing the proverbial stones and sticks?
As urban growth continues to explode, creating downward spirals instead of streamlined utopic dreams, one can ask what will be left from these cavernous buildings or future fossils? And what kind of pillars will hold whatever comes next? Between techno-solutionism and dystopian scripts there might be plenty of other narratives still to build, and tools out there, in the grassroots of our outposts, with water and paper.
(text by Cristina Stoenescu and Edith Lázár for the biennial catalogue)
The 5th edition of the Art Encounters Biennial My Rhino is not a Myth
Curatorial Team: Cristina Bută, Monica Dănilă, Edith Lázár, Ann Mbuti, Adrian Notz, Cristina Stoenescu, Georgia Țidorescu
