Catherine Walsh: On Decolonial Cracks, Seeds, and Plantings
Friday Sept 11
18:00 – 20:00
Online Link here
We invite you to an online talk and conversation with Catherine Walsh. “To crack coloniality means, for me, to open fissures in this totalizing system or matrix of power, and to widen further the fissures that already exist in coloniality’s supposedly impenetrable wall. The fissures and cracks are about the situated and embodied questions and the work we need to do with ourselves, and about the questions and work to be done with social structures, institutions, and practices”.
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.
Biography
Catherine Walsh is a militant intellectual long involved in processes of social struggle and decolonial praxis and pedagogies, first in the United States where she worked closely with Paulo Freire and with teachers, students, communities, and activists from the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and for the last more than 30 years in AbyaYala/Latin America where she continues to work with communities, collectives and movements dedicated to social change.
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CULTIVATORS OF LIFE: Growing Seedbeds of Knowledge
6 September - 8 November 2026
Presented at MODEM - Center for Modern and Contemporary Art
Organized by tranzit.ro/București and MODEM
Opening on 5 September at 16:30
Curators: Adelina Luft (tranzit.ro/București), Krisztián Gábor Török (MODEM)
Participants
Alex Bodea (Berlin), Annalee Davis (Barbados), Aterraterra(Palermo), Colectivo Suumil Móokt’aan (Yucatán), Fuzzy Earth (Budapest), Harun Morrison (London), Horia Bernea (Bucharest), Kitti Gosztola & Bence Pálinkás (Budapest), Marina Sulima (Groningen/Chișinău), Martin Piaček (Bratislava), Mónica de Miranda (Lisbon/London), de Onkruidenier Collective (Amsterdam), Orsolya Gál (Cluj-Napoca), PARI feat. Anang Saptoto (Yogyakarta), Raluca Popa (Berlin/Bucharest).
Cosmos Garden at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life (with contributions from Raluca Voinea, Eduard Constantin, Adelina Ivan, and others), Seed Bank Garden (Adina Moise and works from Codruta Birsan), Uzura Garden (Ana Barbu), Studio-Garden Crețești (Delia Popa), the garden of the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Science in Debrecen (documented by Lilla Váczi) alongside research about the kertségek (the garden districts of Debrecen).
Exhibition design: TEREBINTH studio (Budapest)
The group exhibition is presented within the framework of the two-year programme Cultivators of Life, curated and organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest throughout 2025–2026 at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, partner venues across Bucharest, and at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen. The programme has included artistic residencies, public events in gardens, hands-on workshops, and the Conversations in Living Thought, coordinated by philosopher Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, culminating in this exhibition, organized in partnership with MODEM and co-curated by Adelina Luft (tranzit.ro/Bucharest) and Krisztián Gábor Török (MODEM).
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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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FUTURE GARDENING
by Onkruidenier (Amsterdam) /
Saturday, 25 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS coordinates
De Onkruidenier is a Dutch artist collective exploring the evolving relationship between humans and ecosystems through artistic research, installations, performances, and sensory experiences. Their current artistic research investigates how genetic biodiversity is shaped, displaced, preserved, and reimagined through agriculture, food cultures, and ecological change.
Future Gardening is an ongoing artistic practice by De Onkruidenier that explores gardening as a multisensory method for engaging with ecological futures. Rather than cultivating a garden, we cultivate ways of observing and attuning ourselves to the ecosystems we inhabit.
Through collective observation, participants are invited to reflect on their own role within the ecosystem and to explore how gardening can become a practice for engaging with questions of genetic biodiversity. By working with soil, geology, wild plants and seasonal rhythms, we investigate how ecological relationships are cultivated.
At the Experimental Station, Future Gardening focuses on the ecological memory embedded in wild plants and the local geology, exploring how these living archives relate to contemporary food systems. Together, we will search for stories, species, and relationships that become part of the installation On the Same Ribbon at MODEM in Debrecen.
What can wild plants teach us about the future of food? Where is genetic diversity preserved today? Has the supermarket become an unexpected archive of genetic biodiversity?
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SOIL MICROBIOLOGY: SCIENCE BENEATH THE SURFACE
Georgiana Grigore & Emilia Tănase (Bucharest) /
Saturday, 25 July
15:00 – 19:00
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primăverii 10, Siliștea Snagovului
GPS coordinates
The session will begin with a brief introduction to soil microorganisms, highlighting their essential role in maintaining soil health and supporting ecosystem functioning. The presenters will explain the benefits these microorganisms provide to plants and the environment, while also discussing the other side of the topic by introducing pathogenic microorganisms that can cause diseases in various plant species.
The second part of the workshop will consist of a hands-on practical activity. Participants will have the opportunity to observe bacteria and microscopic fungi (molds) under the microscope using slides prepared during the workshop. The presenters will also bring cultures of microorganisms isolated from soil to demonstrate how these organisms are studied in the laboratory. This activity will allow participants to explore microorganisms that are invisible to the naked eye and gain insight into the techniques used to investigate them.
Partner: DALA Foundation
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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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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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Silent Spring
We build, we repair, we plant, we talk. /
21, 28 March,
4, 25 April 2026
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Int. Primaverii 10, Silistea Snagovului village
In 1962, environmentalist Rachel Carson was publishing her book, Silent Spring, which was thoroughly documenting and denouncing the devastating effects of DDT and other chemicals used intensively as pesticides after WWII. The book raised the awareness on how synthetic pesticides kill indiscriminately insects, birds, soil, and eventually people, while only making stronger the pests against which they are designed to work, and became fundamental for the environmental movement in the United States and worldwide.
Since then, some small victories were obtained, in phasing out chemicals such DDT, or in preventing big polluting projects from being implemented, and yet, the losses were much more substantial and we continue to count them, as toxic chemical agents return in force on the agricultural field and to the field of strategic weapons in current wars.
We can still hear the birds at the Station, and in the past five years, we brought back insects unseen anywhere on the nearby lands of monocultures. While they are still there, we invite you to listen to them and to each other, during a series of spring gatherings, with seasonal work, with collective cooking, and with discussions about whichever future we might have left.
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Merve Bedir: Scaffolds for the Common
Living Thought series /
Thursday, 29 January
17:00 - 19:00
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Sala Noua Galerie)
Entrance from Str. Monetăriei 3
The conversations in the Living Thought series continues througout January to May 2026, part of the programme Cultivators of Life organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
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.
read more /
Morana Miljanović: The Ship Community and the World to Come
Friday, 23 January
17:00 - 19:00
The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant (Sala Noua Galerie)
Entrance from Str. Monetăriei 3
The conversations in the Living Thought series continues througout January to May 2026, part of the programme Cultivators of Life (2025-2026) organized by tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
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.
Morana Miljanović: The Ship Community and the World to Come.
Drawing on her double background as human rights lawyer and ship captain/skipper, including on refugee search and rescue missions as well as the Sumud Flotila, Morana Miljanović shares her reflections on the daily lived solidarity as a source of political reinvention. Could the ship community be a prefiguration of the possible world to come, beyond the violences of empires and nation-states? What spaces could still host a politics based on promises made by the people to the people, and what projects of organization are able to rely on joy as a political category? What are the current challenges and what was achieved in the counter-pedagogy of the Global Sumud Flotila?
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