Artist in residence

În timp ce locuim ("While We Dwell") is a performative sound experiment proposing a new experiential relationship with the city as a hyperorganism. 

The project offers recurring sessions of sound and text performance, broadcast live by artists positioned at various points across the city to an audience gathered in one fixed, shared space. Technology is used as a set of sensory extensions for the participants, enabling a shared kind of immersion in the city's living fabric for 90 minutes.

Both the performers and the participating audience get the chance to actively contribute to the collage of media used and to define their own experience of these shared moments.

We found it hard to connect with this term, 'community' - it's one of those words whose meaning has shifted a lot in recent years, co-opted into all kinds of contexts that have little to do with its substance. We found a way to reconsider it by thinking about plants, and about how our life changed once we started working in a garden, how the way we feel and relate to other creatures changed. We wanted to bring this context into the Reactor space too, to plant a kind of seed, to imagine some people, then some bees, some ants and so on, gathering around it and growing something together, on a very slow timescale.

I started from the idea of the community dinner, which takes place periodically at Reactor, a friendly, intimate setting that's also open, creating a spontaneous collective, bringing us together around a common denominator: food. I felt this concept could be worked with in a performative and immersive way. I realized the strength of the emotional bonds we have with food, how certain tastes are portals to a period, a person, a place, like Proust's madeleine. In this pairing of ideas - food as an emotional portal and the community dinner - it seemed important to me for hearing and taste to take priority, so that sight, which usually dominates, would be obstructed, generating a kind of presence we don't usually reach in everyday life.

The working process for this performance started from my wish to see whether I could reconnect with the communities I was part of in high school. I realized, though, that while this reconnection was possible, many people didn't feel comfortable taking part directly in the show. That's when I understood that what mattered most to me was to talk about dialogue and polarization from the perspective of my own experience. Working alone on the project gave me the freedom to experiment very freely with forms and techniques for staging this theme, until I arrived at the performance's final form. Reactor's invitation to work in relation to the theme of "community/communities" made me want the show itself to become a space for creating temporary communities. And that happened not only during the performance, but also afterwards, when spectators who didn't know each other beforehand started conversations and debates over a cigarette, sometimes ending up staying together for hours after the show, even until 4am.

In response to Reactor's invitation to artistically explore the theme of community, I made a short documentary giving voice to a few people on the local scene with (relative) experience in activism/protest - thinking of this context as one of spontaneous communities gathered around a cause. The 5 people I chose have different professions and ages; the questions are identical for all of them, precisely to highlight the difference in perspectives on the same subject, and the minimal setting helps viewers focus on the interviewees' stories. To still add some dynamism to the linearity of this "talking heads" style material, I also inserted a few short performative moments throughout it, performed by me. 

In Romania, it's an achievement for an independent theatre to last a decade - it's something that places you in a small group, a kind of special club of survivors. So my residency set out to get to know the other members of the "club" better, to discover their space and their story, the hows and whys, the joys, frustrations and disappointments they've gathered over the years. On the other hand, it seemed important to me to also put together a list of tips&tricks, or an inventory of best practices, for surviving as an independent theatre in Romanian culture. Which unfortunately didn't happen - it seems there's no great secret to survival, other than self-exploitation and a bit of luck, according to the people interviewed in the film.

The result is an honest and moving portrait of the Resilient Ones, of those who have withstood shocks coming from expected and unexpected directions, for many years. A slightly more pessimistic picture than I'd hoped for, with tired people who see very clearly the gaps in the system they live and work in, who call for very concrete and realistic measures to fix the system, and who spend all their time, energy and health resources waiting. At the same time, it's a group of organizations that form a community of their own, in which there's a form of solidarity, often of collaboration and support, or at least of respect. I thought it was important to capture that aspect too - I think the community spirit of "we're all going through this and only we know what it's like" is the optimistic ray of light that comes through in the documentary and that invites us to imagine the decades ahead.

Clown in the city is a project that grew out of my curiosity to get to know Cluj-Napoca better. I spend my time in 2 or 3 spots around the city. There's so much I didn't know until I started this project. In short, what I do: I walk through neighbourhoods, I notice certain rules, contrasts of a space, and then I think about how I can create a clownish moment using what I see. I did this in Piața Mărăști too, on the pedestrian crossing. I noticed it's the only place where, regardless of sexual orientation or social category, people pass by one another without any issue. So I thought about getting them to interact with each other through my clown games. I ran races with an elderly man, or danced ballet with raffia bags in hand for various passersby. I can say that, along the way, my theme changed. I realized, over time, that through my presence I was questioning what "normal" means in public space. Some passersby found my presence on the crossing strange, and one comment that stuck with me was from a lady who told me: "you look like a biscuit".

I wanted a space and time that would recover something of the atmosphere of friendships between girls, the kind many of us grew up with and which played a defining role in shaping us. Following an open call, a group of girls came together and made a list of activities they'd do together. Then they met up to do them. Some days left behind small works of art, others just the memory of time spent together. Around each meeting floated questions about femininity, feminism, solidarity, one's relationship with the body, one's relationship with oneself, connection, sexuality, one's relationship with work, the future. What we left behind was a collective painting, and before that, a few new friendships.