Slow practices of autonomy and regeneration
with Ana Barbu in Uzura Garden /
Saturday, 21 June 2025
Hours 15:00 – 20:00
Manasia commune, Ialomița county
From spring to autumn, four different gardens located in close proximity to Bucharest engage in an exchange of seeds, practices and experiences in cultivating and relating as part of the project Cultivators of Life. Starting with a spring session of exchanging seeds and further documenting the growing processes, throughout summer and autumn each gardener opens their space to a public, invited to observe, learn and engage with the knowledge of plants and their network of relationality. Each event is choreographed following each garden’s particular conditions and contexts, as well as each gardener’s own sensibility, expertise and experiences. The process and events are documented by three young harvesters through different media: writing (Irina Bobei), illustration (Maria Doni), and video (Gabriela Cozma).
The first open garden event begins with Ana Barbu, who for ten years has been growing, in a slow process of learning and unlearning, a garden of biodiversity in a 600 sq m land located in Manasia commune, approximately 60 km north-east of Bucharest. For the event, Ana Barbu will invite participants to read together a reflective essay about the garden, followed by walks guided by texts, questions and sensorial and imaginative exercises to connect to plants and the soil that grounds them.
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To Give a House the Form of an Event
Launch of the eco-prototypes built in the frame of the project
Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture
Saturday, 14th of June, 2025, 12-8 pm
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Intr. Primaverii no. 10, Silistea Snagovului
Eco-prototypes
Cosmos Garden: Georgiana Strat
The Eastern Glasshouse: Ștefan Gorie, Vlad Nicolae
The Oven Demeter: V. Leac
The Summer Kitchen Acaret 44°N 26°E: Atelier AdHoc Arhitectură
The phyto-epuration system: atelier d’architecture autogérée
Garden furniture
Relaxation bench: Adrian Filip, Edi Constantin, Oana Radu
Community table: Andrei Ștefan Păsărică, Larisa Danciu, Medeea Sandu, Miruna Roșu, Timea Cristea
Hosts
Adelina Luft
Edi Constantin
Raluca Voinea
Contributions
Adelina Ivan & Mihai Mitran, Alexandra Pirici & Andrei Dinu, Alina Ușurelu, Ana Kun, Anamaria Pravicencu, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Anna Smolak, Athena Dumitriu, Cătălina Frâncu & Teodor Călinoiu, Charles Esche, Dan Vezentan, Dimitrie Grigorescu, Elena Vlădăreanu, Iuliana Dumitru, Konrad Petrovszky, Liliana Basarab, Livia Pancu, Maria Mora, Mihaela Moldovan, Octavia Anghel, Olivia Mihălțianu & Stoyan Dechev, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Raluca Popa, V. Leac, Vlad Basalici, Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Yujin Lee
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Recipes for Ripe Societies
Marina Sulima’s residency, part of the program Cultivators of Life
11.05 – 25.05.2025
Following a previous collaboration for the project Images of the Good Life in the East, a group exhibition organized in Chisinau last year, we have invited Marina Sulima to join us in a two-week residency in Bucharest and at the Station. The residency marks the beginning of the program Cultivators of Life taking place between 2025-2026 with a series of residencies, lectures, workshops and a group exhibition.
During her residency, Marina continued her artistic research Recipes for Ripe Societies. In this project, she aims to draw attention to the relationship between resource extraction and soil degradation through writing of alternative recipes. She took several things with her on her journey: pickled tomatoes, a handful of copper sulfate, crystals, and a bunch of grapevines. Around the village near the Station, she searched for houses made of clay, painted with lime and copper sulfate. She sketched different support structures found in the village for climbing vines to provide shade to the houses, both from wood and clay, or cement and tiles.
“High-tech tomato greenhouses rely on precarious migrant labor, tons of minerals spread out in the form of LED greenhouse lights, sprinklers, sensors and fertilizers. The entire edifice of intensive viticulture would collapse without fungicides, of which copper sulfate is the proudest. What kind of recipes for ripening fruit and our minds will be needed when the earth’s resource belly empties and the LED lights go out?”
We first screened the film Marina recently directed, Consider a Tomato, at The National Peasant Museum in a pre-premiere on the 22nd of May. The film follows the story of tomatoes, from closed-off Dutch greenhouses to Moldova, home to the filmmaker, to the many greenhouse workers who leave their own tomato patches to work behind glass walls. Narrated by Marina herself, the film looks into her family’s story of migration using her mother’s recipe book as an instrument to draw connections between tomatoes-as-protagonist and the social and economic imbalances of tomato production, from the abandoned land parcels of Moldova to the industrial glasshouses in the Netherlands.
More about the movie here.
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Listening to the Earth Beyond Silence
10.5.2025 - 9.8.2025
Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, Art and Culture Centre Kalevan Navetta, Nyykoolinkatu 25, Seinäjoki, Finland
An exhibition curated by The Resurrection Committee: Adelina Luft, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea
With contributions from:
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life & Adelina Ivan, Darya Tsymbalyuk, Eduard Constantin, Jaana Kokko, V. Leac, Vlad Basalici
Collectivo Suumil Móokt’aan & Valiana Aguilar
Weaving Realities & Aldo Esparza Ramos, Yuchen Li
PARI (Panen Apa Hari Ini) & Anang Saptoto
Ingenious trackers overcame the limits of what can be seen by putting their ears to the ground in order to listen to the movement of horses or of a herd of animals coming from a distance. The Earth, large and all-welcoming, holds the weight of all our movements, across seas and continents. Can we learn though to listen to each other? Do we still have time – and do we give ourselves the time to listen beyond silence?
Four different collectives that are re-learning to listen to the Earth beyond silence are bringing here signs from the lands of China, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, and Yucatan, among others.
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CULTIVATORS OF LIFE
Announcement of a new two-year program: CULTIVATORS OF LIFE, initiated by tranzit.ro/Bucharest Association in partnership with MODEM – Center for Modern Contemporary Art in Debrecen, co-financed by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund.
Cultivators of Life is a cultural program that continues and supports the activities started in 2021 at the Experimental Research Station for Research on Art and Life in Siliștea Snagovului, focused on conserving biodiversity, testing ecological prototypes, and rethinking the relationship between soils, materials and artistic production. The program proposes the study and formulation of a new lexicon and practices related to an emerging relationship between indigenous/ancestral knowledge, land cultivation and natural sciences. It will be carried out by organizing a series of artistic residencies at the Experimental Station and in the city of Debrecen in Hungary, public events in four gardens outside Bucharest, applied workshops, conferences with indigenous philosophers and local guests at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, and a final group exhibition at MODEM – Center for Modern and Contemporary Art in Debrecen scheduled to open in October 2026.
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Mimosa Pudica
Residency of artist Valentina Vetturi and a get-together on 26 April 2025 /
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Int. Primaverii no. 10, Silistea Snagovului village
After more than 10 years since her first collaboration with tranzit.ro/Bucharest, artist Valentina Vetturi returns, this time in relation to Mimosa Pudica, her performative research on how learning about their memory with plants can inform principles of digital ecologies.
“At the core of this research are two questions that have fueled my artistic practice for over a decade: how do we remember and forget individually and as a society? And what remains of us when we no longer remember anything or if we remember too much? The movement, the space created between the experiences of forgetting and remembering, shapes the essence, the core of our mutating, hybrid, multiple identities as individuals and collectives. Over the years, I have sought answers to these questions in the persistence of music in human memory. I have looked at web technologies and the depths of their permanent records, and I have observed the fragile memory of papier-mâché dissolving in water. With Mimosa Pudica, I turn to the plant world. Inverting the human-centric perspective, I activate listening, observation, interaction, and learning practices with plants, questioning how they remember and if they forget. This individual listening phase alternates with discursive practices and shared experiences among plants and scholars from diverse disciplines and machines.
During the residency at the Station, we’ll observe some of the plants of the Cosmos Garden and invite a few Mimosa Pudica in the conversation. An ongoing observation in collaboration with tranzit.ro will begin in these days and last until September and maybe more. Parallelly, similar ongoing observations are running physically and remotely in Bari, London, and Hagen.
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Wild, Uncultivated and Spontaneous at La Casa Encendida, Madrid
Tranzit Garden and Cosmos Garden are included in the Festival
Wild, Uncultivated and Spontaneous at La Casa Encendida, Madrid
18 March – 6 April 2025
As part of the Salvajes, Silvestres y Espontáneas 2025 festival at La Casa Encendida, Paisanaje collective in Madrid creates a mural-diagram installation, which presents an open map of projects that reinterpret community gardens as spaces for learning and experimentation.
Paisanaje, with its dual curatorial and artistic nature, presents a selection of initiatives that, from different cities, are exploring new ways of inhabiting the world alongside other species. These gardens invite us to imagine alternative relationships with living beings, where scientific knowledge intertwines with the poetics of our coexistence with plants, animals, and fungi.
Installed on the mezzanine wall, the exhibition functions as a living archive—a space for the exchange of knowledge and the convergence of inspiring proposals. Eight invited projects will share documents, photographs, audio recordings, and manifestos, allowing connections to emerge between their experiences and those of visitors to the space.
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Spring works at the Station
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Int. Primaverii no. 10, Silistea Snagovului village, north of Bucharest, Romania
GPS coordinates
The Station is a participatory place, where the fruits of the earth are more plentiful when grown with a multiplicity of hands, where the songs of birds reverberate through many ears that are willing to hear them, where we see the generosity of the plants in return for us taking care of them and where we can touch the stories of those who helped building the structures we use. If you want to take part in this process, of planting, building, mending, accompanied by cooking, listening, remembering, drop us a line at raluca.voinea@tranzit.org. The open sessions usually take place on Saturdays.
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Moving away from Meta
tranzit.ro/București is gradually withdrawing from the social media platforms owned by Meta corporation. To be consistent with our programmes and mission, we can no longer legitimate and invest (time, energy, data) into an instrument of censorship and repression, which is currently in the service of a political regime that is prioritizing the violent erasure of truth and the disestablishment of the most common human rights.
In active search for other platforms where we can communicate with our peers and our publics, you can meanwhile find us on Bluesky: @tranzitb.bsky.social, on Pixelfed: pixelfed.social/Statia, and you can subscribe to our newsletter on https://ro.tranzit.org/en/newsletter/.
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Mihaela Moldovan: The Endless Thread of Hope
tranzit.ro/București and The Last Archive present:
Mihaela Moldovan: The Endless Thread of Hope
21 December 2024, 2-6 p.m.
A temporary intervention at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Int. Primaverii no. 10, Silistea Snagovului village
GPS Coordinates
A ball of straws is wrapped in a lacery made from fragile but strong cord, bringing together the organic and modest material that forms the core of the work and the thread as a long-standing symbol of connectedness in the world and to the other layers of life. Situated in the field and interacting with the natural elements, the object becomes a small sun fallen on the ground, a glimmer of colour and hope during the short winter days. Gradually, surrounded by the growing vegetation in spring and baked by the real sun in summer, the ball of straws and string will become and belong to the earth, will disappear into the landscape which, for a short while, it had attempted to treat as an upside down sky.
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L’Internationale presents two new publications: Soils & Collective Study in Times of Emergency
L’Internationale presents two new publications:
Soils
internationaleonline.org/publications/soils
Soils was published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum.
Soil is a strong and resistant material. It is alive, it breathes, and it can recover. In this exhibition, soil is seen as both matter and metaphor. For some, soil is used as an artistic vehicle. For others, soil is a metaphor for the possibility of not only resistance but also the re-existence of under-standing about our relations with the Earth today.
This book is a reflection on the Soils exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum. The exhibition was five years in the planning and the book leads you through the various phases of its realisation. Alongside a rich selection of images, it includes texts by the three curators, artists and key interlocutors: Teresa Cos Rebollo, Zena Cumpston Charles Esche, Wapke Feenstra/Inez Dekker, Victoria Lynn, Struggles for Sovereignty and Rolando Vazquez.
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life had a small display presented in the Soils exhibition, curated by the Resurrection Committee (Adelina Luft, Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea), with contributions from Anonymous artist (Transylvania, 19th century), Adelina Ivan, Anang Saptoto, Eduard Constantin, Livia Pancu.
vanabbemuseum.nl/en/see-and-do/exhibitions-activities/soils
Collective Study in Times of Emergency
internationaleonline.org/publications/collective-study-in-times-of-emergency/
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News from the Station
Dear friends, followers and distant readers,
It has been a tough year for us at the Station: drought, sorrow, building work advancing too slowly and older age settling in too quickly. Yet: the plants we saved from being completely scorched, the vegetables that our neighbours still managed to harvest, the new neighbours who did not let themselves discouraged and joined us on the lands nearby the Station, the friends who came to plant and the new visitors who came to listen, what we did manage to build, the allies and peers from distant places, the sunsets and the green grass emerging after the rain, the insects we didn’t have last year, the lizards called Sam, they were all so many reasons for encouragement, helping us to counter the agenda of doom guiding life in other places, close and afar.
December should have been a time of celebrating our collective survival for another year, instead, we find ourselves stranded in the only territory that still feels safe for the moment: our imaginary of hope, our horizon of trust in people’s desires for the common good rather than for the individual capitulation in front of the apocalypse. We (people at and around the Station, birds, artichokes, insects, lizards, stray dogs and more) think this territory can be as wide as we want to stretch it, as fertile as we struggle to irrigate it, as welcoming as we dare to make it.
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