The summer school DIAGRAMS OF WATER
Alternator, the interdisciplinary working platform developed around topics related to the Danube–Black Sea Canal and waterborne transport infrastructures both globally and in the South-East Europe region, in partnership with tranzit.ro/București organises
The summer school DIAGRAMS OF WATER, in the period 27—31 July. The workshops, presentations, and film screenings will be split between the Experimental Research Station for Art and Life and 24 Arcului Street.
The summer school offers an interdisciplinary program dedicated to exploring water as a biological, ecological, and social matter, viewed through the infrastructures that make it possible, distribute it, and control it. In the context of the climate crisis and geopolitical changes, water is becoming increasingly visible not only as a resource, but also as a space of tension, negotiation, and imagination. From pipelines and dams to bodies and ecosystems, from access and distribution to crisis and resistance, the Diagrams of Water summer school proposes an investigation of water as both material and imagined infrastructure.
The Summer School programme adopts an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together artists, theorists, and practitioners from a range of fields. Over the course of one week, participants will explore topics through a series of workshops, including water at the intersection of theory and literature, the ethics of artists' moving image, monumental art, illustration, and curatorial approaches related to the programme's theme. The workshop series concludes with a session dedicated to practices of political and food autonomy.
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Emigrant Melodies: Leaf Whistling
Kitti Gosztola and Bence György Pálinkás /
Saturday, 18 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS CoordInates
For their workshop at the Experimental Station, Kitti Gosztola and Bence György Pálinkás will explore the traditional folk technique of leaf whistling together with the participants.
Gosztola and Pálinkás have long been interested in the role and symbol of plants in folk culture and folk music. Culture, often perceived as national, is shaped by a constant exchange of its building blocks. Melodies and lyrics travel across linguistic and cultural borders. Plants also move with humans. The artists’ projects try to look at culture not as something that needs to be conserved in an imagined pure form, but as something that needs to be in constant motion.
The leaf whistle can only sound while the plant still holds enough moisture and flexibility, so the sound remains ephemeral and closely tied to the living material. They will experiment with the different sounds of different so-called native and alien species. And they will try to sound together with this archaic technique which is especially good for expressing feelings.
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Romania's Ways of Opening to the World: A Conversation with Bogdan Iacob
Saturday, 18 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS CoordInates
The former socialist states of the Eastern Bloc have the distinct and rare epistemic advantage of going in recent history through the living experience of two very different paradigms that have determined to a significant extent both the internal social order and the external political positioning and presence. However, the width of this epistemic difference has been all but erased in the exclusively Western orientation of East European working bodies and minds after the “opening” of the Iron Curtain, which ironically has reduced the local sense of the world. But how did the travelers, the workers and the professional classes – doctors, architects, artists – traverse this difference, then and now? What lessons could be learned and what remains valid and useful for reopening our sense of the world today, towards a world of solidarity and plurality, hope and reinvention?
Coordinated by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, the conversations in Living Thought aim to introduce contemporary scholars and artists who are working in the emerging field of knowledge and practices relating to land, to indigenous/ancestral knowledges and eco-social realities, and who are proposing not only reviews of problems, but visionary alternative paths. Continuing of the ongoing work of the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, the intellectual conversations in Living Thought are tools of conviviality aiming to spark the radical imagination needed to change our relations to culture, to re-orient our sense of the world, and to regain an ethical life outside the ongoing war on life.
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More Than 20 Years of tranzit.org. Launch of the book tranzit 20+
4th of July, tranzit ro/ Iasi, in the frame of Iasi Pride 2026 events
Time: 13:00 - 15:00
Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, 700115, Iași
22nd of July, Feredeului Building, in the frame of Imagined Organisations events.
Strada Feredeului 4, MD-2005, Chișinău
18:30-19:30
To mark the occasion of more than twenty years of the tranzit.org network, the book launch for tranzit 20+ will be held in both Iasi (RO) on the 4th of July and Chișinău (MD) on the 22nd of July. The book summarizes the work of the tranzit.org network, which includes tranzit.at (Austria), tranzit.cz (Czech Republic), tranzit.hu (Hungary), tranzit.ro in Iași, Bucharest, and Cluj (Romania), and tranzit.sk (Slovakia). It looks at the network’s history, its current work, and its future plans. The publication shows the experiments, partnerships, methods, and shared support that have kept independent art alive through different political times over the last twenty years.
Contributing authors and artists: Larissa Agel, Karin Akai, Judit Angel, Zbyněk Baladrán, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefán, Florin Bobu, Aleksei Borisionok, Anetta Mona Chişa, Eduard Constantin, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Max Dvořák, ex-artists collective (Tamás Kaszás & Anikó Loránt), František Fekete, Maja Fowkes & Reuben Fowkes, Flóra Gadó, Ines Gebetsroither, Michaela Geboltsberger, Dóra Hegyi, Hollow (Gyula Muskovics, Tamás Páll, Viktor Szeri), Oto Hudec, József Mélyi, Jana Kapelová, Július Koller, Iva Kovač, Isabella Kresse, Júlia Laki, Renan Laru-an, Zsuzsa László, Paula Malinowska, Ina Mertens, Helena Mustakallio, OMARA (Mara Oláh), Livia Pancu, Mirjam Paninski, Lia Perjovschi, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Nela Pietrová, Marlies Pillhofer, Raluca Popa, Emília Rigová, Ivana Rumanová, Georg Schöllhammer, Olga Shparaga, Renata Šikoronja, Save As Team, Borbála Soós, Tereza Stejskalová, The School of Dissolving – Expanding – Reconnecting Imagination (Tereza Čajková, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Eva Koťátková), Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Attila Tordai-S., Raluca Voinea, Aleksandrina Yordanova.
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The Civic Café: Visibility as a premise of equality!!!
4th of July,
@tranzitiasi, in the frame of Iasi Pride 2026 events
Time: 13:00 - 15:00
Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, 700115, Iași
Program:
13:00 - 13:30 Book launch and performative reading / Launch of the book
tranzit 20+
13:30 - 15:00 Public presentation by Florin Buhuceanu:
Queer visual histories. Visibility as a premise of equality
We are proud to invite you for a joint event between Rise Out and tranzit ro/Iași within the frame of Iasi Pride that will take place on the 4th of July @tranzitiasi space.
Together, we start by performing a reading with excerpts from tranzit 20+ publication, applying a methodology proposed by its two editors: Flóra Gadó and Borbála Soós.
The reading will be followed by Florin Buhuceanu’s presentation: Queer visual histories. Visibility as a premise of equality, where, starting from the premise that 20th-century media visibility of queerness was a discourse about (not by) queer people, the author traces how queer self-representation nonetheless persisted.
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Imagined Organisations: Practices of Artistic Research Moving Across Semiperipheries
Iași (Romania) and Chișinău (Republic of Moldova)
July 22–27, 2026
This six-day international gathering, July 22–27, 2026 in Iași and Chișinău brings artists, curators and theorists together to exchange practices and perspectives on how artistic organisations face the new challenges raised by the transformative impact of artistic research. The practice and discourse of contemporary art have undergone profound changes with the emergence of artistic research, one of the most important factors that has shaped established practice in the field. Furthermore, artistic research has presented an entire set of new challenges and pressures on the institutional forms through which both state and non-state actors support artistic development. This has not been a uniform development, but one that has different characteristics across various political geographies.
Participation is free, however, in person places are limited, book here by 10th of July.
We provide the bus transport from Chișinău to Iași for the first 25 bookings. All other costs are borne by the participants.
Contributors:
Clara Abdullah & Elena Russu (RO/MD/PMR), Bojana Piskur (SI), Dan Acostioaei (RO), Victor Ciobanu (MD), Charles Esche (NL), Djordje Balmajović (SI), Andrei Morari (PMR/MD), Minna Henriksson & Sezgin Boynik (FI/RKS), Vitalie Sprînceană (MD), Cătălin Gheorghe (RO), Cristina David (RO), Mick Wilson (IRL/SE), Olja Triaška Stefanović (SK), Ioana Florea (RO), Maria Hlavajova (NL), Ghenadie Popescu (MD), Baran Caginli (TR/FI), Livia Pancu & Florin Bobu (RO), Matei Bejenaru (RO), Vladimir Us (MD), Alexandru Țîrdea (RO), Maxim Polyakov (PMR/MD), Rusanda Alexandru (MD) and others.
Full program and other details you can find here. Participation free.Booking required until the 10th of July.
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And What Does the Background Say?
Call for applications /
An ecocritical and ecofeminist workshop led by Zsuzsa Selyem and Anna Zilahi
June 18–21
hypha_etc campsite, Câmpu Cetății/Vármező, Mureș county, Romania
Application deadline: June 10, 22:00 EET
Over four days we treat ecocriticism as a way of sensing, thinking, and moving together with a more than human world under capitalism. Language is our main medium, but it is never abstract: we will work with how words have weight, how they mark and police living bodies, and how attention can be trained to stay with the material and political conditions of speaking and writing.
In the middle of a forested landscape, our sessions will be literally situated in the environment rather than just about it. Ecocritical discussions will decenter canonical human protagonists and redirect focus toward the so called background: plants, animals, elements, infrastructures, and terrains that usually only stage the human plot, or are treated as resources, property, or scenery. We will ask what happens to a story when these become agents instead of backdrop, when the setting starts to speak.
Walks and excursions will be spaces for interspecies encounters and experiments in presence that resist touristic consumption of nature. We will listen, touch, taste, and get lost a little, using these experiences as raw material for writing that takes seriously the beings we cross paths with. Transmedial practices – from cyanotypes to sonic experiments – will help us push beyond strictly logocentric, human centered habits and let other forces (silence, noise, movements, emotions, weather, infrastructure) into the work.
The workshop encourages meditative attention, but also plays with deliberate intensity: there will be quiet observational practices, but also moments of being unapologetically loud. Stargazing is non negotiable – both as an exercise in scale and as a reminder that any green we interact with is caught up in wider planetary crises, just as we are.
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Andrei Morari, Dima
Exhibition Opening: 10 June 2026, 5 p.m.
On view: 10 June – 11 July 2026
tranzit.ro/ Iași, Str. Sf. Atanasie nr. 25, Iași, Romania
Soviet cinema of the early twentieth century developed one of the most ambitious theories of documentary filmmaking. Vertov believed the camera to be a device “more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaotic visual phenomena that fill space” — not simply recording reality, but uncovering it. Unscripted shots, non-professional subjects, the candid camera — these were tools of truth-telling, bound to a political purpose. “Not candid shooting for its own sake,” Vertov wrote, “but in order to show people without a mask, without makeup, to catch them with the eye of the camera in a moment of non-acting.” The image was meant to serve a historical argument. Postmodern criticism challenged this idea, showing that every image is shaped by who makes it — their background, beliefs, and the social conditions they inhabit. Pasolini, in “The Cinema of Poetry,” put it plainly: “the spontaneous choice of images by the director is inevitably determined by his ideological and poetic vision of the world at that moment.” What appears on screen is not a window onto reality, but a particular way of seeing it.
This exhibition is the result of an experiment situated between these two ideas. Dima was made using methods borrowed from the early avant-garde — no script, no staging, no editing — but without the certainty that drove them. The work claims no special access to truth and offers no political message. Instead, it accepts that what it shows is inseparable from the experience, relationships, and circumstances of the person who made it. Perhaps this honesty is what allows the documentary approach to remain meaningful today. Observation without an agenda still records — exclusion, silence, inequality. Reality, it seems, speaks for itself. The language of cinema keeps changing. “Cinema is not the reflection of reality,” Godard wrote, “but the reality of the reflection” — a reminder that the search for new forms is always also a search for new ways to see. For me, this experiment is an attempt to turn the invisible, the hidden, the dismissed sides of life into something worth looking at: work that might prompt reflection, and perhaps a little more openness toward those who rarely get to speak. (Andrei Morari, 21 march 2026)
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Summer School “Ecologies of Emancipation” – 6th Edition: The Golden Age of the Dark Enlightenment?
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION /
10–16 August 2026
Location: hypha_etc, Câmpu Cetății, Mureș County (Romania)
Application deadline: 30 June 2026
Rarely has an ideological platform transformed so rapidly from a niche, marginal, and extreme set of public ideas into an objective reality and an uninhibited Zeitgeist. The Dark Enlightenment has accomplished precisely this within barely a decade: from an internet counterculture carrying an explicitly reactionary charge – anti-egalitarian and repressive, obscurantist yet no less technocratic, hierarchical-elitist, and simultaneously populist-demagogic, libertarian and neoliberal while also corporatist-feudal – it has become an assertive and aggressive component of public discourse, both in the centers of the core and in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of the world-system. At the same time, it is also the objective reality of a world surviving beyond its own modern, Enlightenment foundations: on the one hand, the international legal order, now abolished and reconverted into a state of nature through a series of military aggressions conducted under exceptional legal regimes initiated by the world’s hegemonic powers, from the Iraq War to Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the recent war against Iran and Lebanon: on the one hand, the international legal order, now abolished and reverted to a state of nature by a series of military aggressions under exceptional legal regimes initiated by the world’s hegemonies, from the war in Iraq to Ukraine, to the genocide in Gaza and the recent war on Iran and Lebanon; and on the other hand, the welfare-state social compromise of modern states, the package of recognition and redistribution that until recently formed the basis of democratic systems, today deeply eroded by increasingly severe waves of austerity policies and overexploitation, segregation, and exclusion. It seems that the Dark Enlightenment is the most radical and overt theoretical justification for the betrayal of Enlightenment ideals in political practice over the past few decades. The success of this spectacular achievement of the Dark Enlightenment is all the more remarkable in that it did not need to go through the “mass” phase — through the dissemination and adoption of this perspective by the majority of society — but leaped directly from social media channels and the corridors of venture & platform capitalism into the halls and salons of official power and the mainstream media, rebuilding its popularity rather retroactively and from the top down.
This year’s edition of the summer school “Ecologies of Emancipation” seeks to interrogate not only the configuration and spectacular evolution of this ideological platform – both in terms of its ideological content and its material (political-economic) foundations – but also, more broadly and more urgently, the kind of world in which such an ideology, grounded in such a material basis, could become a general metanarrative overnight.Thus, alongside the ideological background of the Dark Enlightenment and its reverberations on the left in various forms of accelerationism, the presentations delivered within the summer school will examine the current crisis of the international legal order and modern constitutionalism, civilizational legitimations, the reactionary echoes of neoliberal thought as well as of new labor and production relations, the cultural and educational policies of the new reaction, the alliance between venture and platform capitalism and the military complex as the material basis of the post-liberal order, as well as the crises, challenges, and possibilities for the reconstitution of emancipatory movements in this context.
This year’s edition of the “Ecologies of Emancipation” summer school aims to examine not only the structure and spectacular evolution of this ideological platform—that is, both its ideological content and its material (political-economic) foundation—but also, more broadly and with greater concern, what kind of world this is in which such an ideology, with such a material basis, could become a general metanarrative overnight. Thus, in addition to the ideological underpinnings of the Dark Enlightenment, as well as its reverberations on the left in various forms of accelerationism, the presentations delivered at the school will examine the current crisis of the international legal order and modern constitutionalism, civilizational legitimations, the reactionary echoes of neoliberal thought as well as of new relations of labor and production, the cultural and educational policies of the new reaction, the alliance between venture & platform capitalism and the military-industrial complex as the material basis of the post-liberal order, as well as the crises, challenges, and opportunities for the reconstitution of emancipation movements in this context.
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Raising stone walls as windshields
Martin Piaček /
Wednesday, 27 May
11:00 - 18:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intrarea Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS coordinates
The Cultivators of Life programme continues this year with a new series of artist residencies, talks, and workshops. We are delighted to host Martin Piaček in a short residency from 25 May to 31 May, continuing his previous visit to the Station in October 2025.
During his time at the Station, Martin will develop a series of permanent stone installations intended to protect some of the garden’s more fragile plants, including the fig tree, the Japanese willow, and other shrubs. The project extends a practice connected to his orchard in Rajka, a small town in Hungary near Bratislava, where he lives and works. Composed of fig trees, walnuts, and a variety of fruit-bearing species, the orchard functions as a space where cultivation intersects with leisure, utility with beauty, labour with contemplation, and landscape-making with forms of sharing and care. Through this ongoing work, Martin brings into relation ecological processes, interpersonal exchanges, and forms of coexistence between human and more-than-human life.
The ancient practice of stacking stones carries a range of practical, symbolic, and ecological meanings. Beyond their historical role as markers or defensive structures, stone piles may also be understood as forms of small-scale garden architecture: spatial interventions that invite life to gather around them. Through their material presence, they create conditions for biodiversity to emerge, generating microclimates, shelter, and spaces of coexistence.
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Readings from a selection of fictional gardens
Harun Morrison /
Wednesday, 27 May
11:00 - 18:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intrarea Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS coordinates
The Cultivators of Life programme continues this year with a new series of artist residencies, talks, and workshops. We are delighted to host Harun Morrison in a short residency from 20 May to 31 May.
Over the past few years, Harun has been building an evolving archive of fictional gardens in literature. Some of these descriptions have been recorded as audio readings by friends. For this event, participants are invited to select and read a passage describing a fictional garden of their own choosing. Readings may be presented in any language, though Romanian fictional literature is especially encouraged.
During his time in Bucharest and at the Station, Harun will continue developing field notes and writing in dialogue with the Station’s social and material context. His reflections emerge from observing working processes and the infrastructures that sustain events, gatherings, and forms of coexistence between humans and more-than-human life, engaging concepts such as unfinishedness, maintenance, and interminable work.
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Announcement of the winners of the residency program at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg 2026
Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts
Intensive workshops of between two and three weeks, dealing with topical questions of art production and directed by outstanding artists from all over the world – this is what awaits you at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts.
Founded in 1953 by Oskar Kokoschka as the "School of Seeing", in Hohensalzburg Fortress, it is the oldest of its kind in Europe.
Every year, some 300 participants from more than 50 countries attend some 20 courses offered in two fixed locations: Hohensalzburg Fortress and the Untersberg quarry in Fürstenbrunn, as well as in further temporary spaces in the town of Salzburg.
Well-known artists, curators and critics from all over the world offer courses focusing on topical questions of art production, as well as curatorial practice and writing about art.
We would like to express our solidarity with Ukraine and the people who have to endure or flee from the ongoing war there. Therefore we open this program to Ukrainian artists as well and dedicate two fellowships to them.
ERSTE Foundation offers fourteen fellowships for young artists and emerging curators from Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine to take part in a course of their choice at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg 2026.
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ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit:
