Images of the Good Life in the East
Exhibition and Forum /
Chișinău, 14-28 September 2024
Exhibition participants: Darya Tsymbalyuk, Ghenadie Popescu, Maria Doni, Marina Sulima, Nikita Kadan, Pavel Brăila, Tatiana Fiodorova, Alexandra Tatar, Ana Barbu, Ana Kun, Andrei Nacu, Catherine Morland, Daria Nedelcu in collaboration with Cyrill Lim, Jo Brăilescu, Irina Botea & Jon Dean, Lilia Nenescu, Maria Mora in collaboration with Tudor Vlădescu, Paula Dunker, Raluca Popa, Silvia Dogaru
Exhibition venues: Bunker, Lutnița, Zpațiu
Opening: 14 September 2024
Forum participants: Charles Esche (online), Corina Oprea (online), Elena Crippa, Irina Cios, Magda Radu, Miki Braniște (online), Sara Buraya, Theo Prodromidis, Zdenka Badovinac (online), Diana Munteanu, Lilia Dragneva, Nora Dorogan, Octavian Eșanu (online), Pavel Brăila, Rusanda Curcă, Ştefan Rusu, Tatiana Fiodorova, Valeria Barbas, Vitalie Sprînceană, Vladimir Us and others
National Art Museum of Moldova
15 September 2024
Curators: The Resurrection Committee (Adelina Luft, Nora Dorogan, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea)
From 14 to 28 September 2024 the project “Images of the Good Life in the East” will take place in Chișinău, organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest in partnership with teatru-spălătorie, Ksak Association (Center for Contemporary Art Chișinău) and Bunker space, Lutnița gallery, Zpațiu, and The National Art Museum of Moldova. Curated by Adelina Luft, Nora Dorogan, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, and Raluca Voinea, the project consists of an exhibition in the partner spaces with an opening on 14 September, and a public forum at the National Art Museum of Moldova taking place on 15 September.
The exhibition brings together artists from Moldova and Ukraine: Ghenadie Popescu, Marina Sulima, Tatiana Fiodorova, Pavel Brăila, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Maria Doni, Nikita Kadan, together with 14 participants from the independent course “Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life” (October 2023 - May 2024): Alexandra Tatar, Ana Barbu, Ana Kun, Andrei Nacu, Catherine Morland, Daria Nedelcu in collaboration with Cyrill Lim, Jo Brăilescu, Irina Botea & Jon Dean, Lilia Nenescu, Maria Mora in collaboration with Tudor Vlădescu, Paula Dunker, Raluca Popa, and Silvia Dogaru.
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Quiet Food Sovereignity in Eaestern Europe
Lecture /
With Natalia Momonova (Ukraine/Norway)
respondent: Valer Simion Cosma (Romania)
Friday, 19th 2024, 6-8 p.m
at The National Museum of Romania Peasant (Sala Acvariu entrance from the restaurant)
Cover credits: watercolor painting by Natalia Mamonova
Feeding a growing world population with sustainably produced food has been a challenge and it became critically important in the wake of covid-19, climate change, the wars in ukraine and gaza, and the rise of the far right in europe. while politicians debate how to make our food systems more innovative and resilient, there is a solution that has been available and practised in eastern europe for decades. smallholder farming and local food networks are widespread in many post-socialist countries, but are not typically seen as sustainable alternatives to globalised industrial agriculture. meanwhile, as the example of ukraine has shown, these practices are not only environmentally friendly and sustainable, but also capable of feeding the country’s population with healthy food in peace and wartime.
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Discussion around the book Bright Ecologies with Caretto/Spagna
Saturday, 6th of July.2024, at 2. p.m
A meeting at The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
GPS Coordinates
The Italian artistic duo Caretto/Spagna will present their first monograph entitled "Bright Ecologies. Caretto/Spagna: experiences, forms, materials" which extensively traces and documents more than 20 years of their artistic research structured on research involving care, the transformation of matter and experiments in form, materialized in sculptures, site-specific installations, laboratories, residencies, actions, and collective projects based on encounter, process, gift, participation, and co-authorship. The result of a close dialogue between artists, curators, and the publisher, the publication blends a documentary approach, critical and theoretical interpretation, and a rich body of descriptions and images.
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Acting with others: collaborative practices across architecture, design, and radical pedagogies
A series of presentations followed by a discussion and dinner in the garden
With:
Floating (Berlin) / Kristin Lazarova and Jöran Mandik
El Warcha (Tunis) / Aziz Aissaoui, Radhouane Boudhraa, and Marlène Halguevache
Atelier Adhoc Community (Bucharest) / George Marinescu and Daria Oancea
Wednesday, 26 June 2024, 17:00 – 21:00
At The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Organised under the frame of the Creative Europe project Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture, the event brings together three self-organised practices of civic action that operate at the intersection of different disciplines through collaborative work and ways of coming together that respond to the specific conditions of each site. Driven by an interest and desire to cultivate collaborations, taking care of neighbourhood connections, building temporary urban furniture and installations with local inhabitants, or by developing potential living scenarios for marginalised urban communities, all three projects seek a new language of practice or new practices altogether for imagining and creating different forms of living.
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Residency and artistic intervention – Jaana Kokko
24 June – 3 July 2024
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Siliștea Snagovului village
After a Gregorian calendar year, Helsinki-based artist Jaana Kokko returns to the village of Siliștea Snagovului. She is interested in gathering with the plants that are growing on the sides, taking the position of being not in the center. She asks: What are they revealing us with their hidden pigments and forms? And even more: What does it need from a garden to become a place/ space for emancipation, a place for political enlightenment?
Her search in the fields around the Station is inspired by dear places of her past, and the emotional connection to Maitohorsma, Fireweed (Ebilobium angustifolium).
The plant is very common in Finland, and it appears especially when the forests are cut clear, which is unfortunately still very common practice. One hundred years Fireweed was still rare in Central Europe, but the burning ruins of both world wars gave space for it and it started to blossom on the lands emptied by fire. The leaves of Fireweed unveil a yellow light pigment. The color gives pleasure, when it appears, it feels like a small, uncovered secret.
After her research residency at the Station last year, Jaana focuses this time on a precise task, albeit one that shows the ephemerality of being in this world. Collecting flowers and seeds from the area, while paying attention these are plentiful, she extracts the pigments from them, using the organic colours afterwards for woodcut printing. At the same time, this offers the team of the Station an occasion to learn the skill of working with plants pigments in order to further challenge the community of artists around (as well as the children in the village) on the importance of materials used in art, and of accepting the limited time an art work may exist in the world.
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Flowing Streams Residency
at The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life /
15 June – 15 July 2024
Václav Šana (The Czech Republic) has been selected to join Flowing Streams, a multi-residency project in rural areas of Romania exploring local approaches to the cultural ecology of water, organized by EUNIC Romania in collaboration with curator Adelina Luft.
At The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life at Silistea Snagovului, Václav will document and evaluate pre-selected sites from the vicinity of The Station, including Lake Snagov and other sources of ground water. He will look at the scale, social, cultural and environmental aspects of the water sources to develop an analytical documentation of the water channels through diagrams and drawings.
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Residency and artistic intervention – Darya Tsymbalyuk
June – July 2024
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Siliștea Snagovului village
“If, following rivers and rivulets, lagoons, meadows, plavni, and forests, you keep going down southwest from the south of Ukraine, you might eventually pass over the Stația experimentală de cercetare pentru artă și viață. Perhaps, then, looking up at the sky for a second, I will catch a glimpse of you, a greeting from places that have raised me.
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Gathering into the Maelstrom
17-20 April 2024
in Venice at Sale Docks is a four-day programme curated by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and Sale Docks
'Gathering into the Maelstrom' – at Sale Docks Dorsoduro 265 in Venice – is an invitation to learn to inhabit the vortex of our contemporary moment, rooting artistic production in ecological struggles, and transforming the field of contemporary art into a political territory. To generate a Museum of the Commons we must both question the toxicity that permeates institutions and, at the same time, build non-capitalistic, non-colonial, non-patriarchal, and non-anthropocentric alliances.
tranzit.ro, as a partner organisation in the Museum of the Commons project, participate to two of the events at the gathering: the Climate
17-20 April 2024
Assembly (through the presence of Adelina Luft, Eduard Constantin, Delia Bulgaru, Livia Pancu, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea), and the Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto book launch and panel (through the participation of Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea), both on Friday, 19 April 2024.
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FLOWING STREAMS
Open call for participation /
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life is one of the seven local organisations to host the multi-residency project Flowing Streams taking place in the rural areas of Romania between June-September 2024, developed by EUNIC Romania in collaboration with curator Adelina Luft. It involves seven cultural institutions operating in Romania – the British Council, the Czech Centre, the Embassy of the Netherlands, the Goethe-Institut, the Italian Institute for Culture, the Polish Institute and Fundația9, each engaged in supporting one residency.
The call is open to interdisciplinary and socially-engaged artists, architects/landscape architects, hydrologists, anthropologists, community organisers from Czech Republic, Italy, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Poland and Romania.
Submission deadline: 7 April 2024
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Hiwa K – artist in residency in Bucharest and at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Siliștea Snagovului
15 - 29 of March 2024
We are very happy to welcome artist Hiwa K in a residency in Bucharest and at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. In the frame of the "Museum of the Commons" project, he will give a presentation for the participants to the course "Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life", led by Ovidiu Tichindeleanu.
Hiwa K was born in Kurdistan-Northern Iraq in 1975. His informal studies in his home town Sulaymaniyah were focused on informal knowledge in a vernacular language. After moving to Europe in 2002, Hiwa K studied music as a pupil of the Flamenco master Paco Peña in Rotterdam, and subsequently settled in Germany. His works escape normative aesthetics but give a possibility of another vibration to vernacular forms, oral histories (Chicago boys, 2010), modes of encounter (Cooking with Mama, 2006) and political situations (This lemon tastes of apple, 2011).
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Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
tranzit. ro/București and The Last Archive present:
Nicoleta Moise: The Blue Dream
21 December 2023, 4-7 p.m.
A temporary intervention at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Coordinates
Access: by car via DN1 or A3; by bus no. 446, departure from Piața Presei Libere, arrival at Pescari stop
Since 2012, when the Maya apocalypse did not exactly happen on a planetary scale as predicted, we have witnessed instead an agglomeration of gradual apocalypses, usually inflicted on those who don’t have back-up plans, with bunkers and rifles and know-it-all-scenarios, protect-your-family infrastructures. The world is falling apart, not only in its physical condition, but also in its very reason for existing as a space that allows breathing and thriving of the spirit, be it human or other. As we write these lines, we are watching the erasure of people, of humanity, of common sense, of any sense, of reason and empathy altogether, of the will to live, confronted as we are with the capitalist-colonial-military apparatus. Destruction and doom, repression and censorship, chemical weapons and threat of nuclear escalation, on top of the existing wars, and the countless disasters that the media only reports for a limited time, on the backdrop of lifestyle advice, with gym exercises and nutritional advice, cooking and gardening recipes, pictures of cats and babies, watch the apocalypse from the cosy, fireplace-heated living room.
With tranzit. ro/București, every year on the 21st of December we gather to celebrate we survived for one more year. What about those who didn’t survive? Not because they were old and their time on this earth was peacefully coming to an end, but because of so many other reasons that we find hard to come to terms with?
We cannot fight death, no matter who inflicts it. We can, however, remember those who tried to live.
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Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life
Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life
The experimental course Non-Western Technologies for the Good Life (November 2023 - May 2024) celebrates as its starting point the anniversary of 50 years since the publication of Tools for Conviviality, considering that Ivan Illich’s call is as relevant as ever.
Modernization is an all-conquering force, yet it is never enough. The climate crisis looms large, while extractivism and the war against life are pressing on. Illich called for a “multidimensional balance of human life”, for finding a balanced scale to the growth of anything, and for identifying the convivial tools needed to rethink technology and the relation to the world. Relying on convivial tools would enable communities and societies to exit the trap of the paradigm of infinite accumulation, to develop self-sufficiency outside globalization, and to regain an ethical life outside extractivism, exploitation and impoverishment.
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